Coincidentally I ran into an issue just like this a week ago. A customer facing application failed because there was an object named “/foo/bar” (emphasis on the leading slash).
This created a prefix named “/“ which confused the hell out of the application.
Many tools end up handling this by showing a folder named "a" containing a folder named "" (empty string). This confuses users quite a bit. It's more than the inodes, it's how the tooling handles the abstraction.