In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we actually say they're intuitive.
But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line interfaces.
You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface, learn about the underlying principles of usability and interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would be different. But the principles he started from are foundational and very useful.
Today we have Miro and it works like that. I hate it.
Zooming, from a building, to a room, to a bookshelf, to a book/folder/boxfile, to the content and the location within the content worked with my brain. With digital files it just seems like a swamp I have to wade through. Microsoft are so antagonistic to my 'location' based thinking because Windows conceals where files really are.
But I do not think that Raskin was channelling some remarkable stream of insight into these matters. And yes, "idolize" was more poking fun at people who use superlatives to describe him, in my opinion without much justification.
I used GNU Emacs as an example for precisely this reason.
We're supposed to idolize this as some sort of hyper-enlightened version of interface design? Hell no.
I get that this design worked for Raskin. It worked for him the same way that my hacked version of GNU Emacs' next-line function does for me when the cursor is at the end of the buffer, or how I needed a version of its delete-horizontal-space but that would work only after the cursor.
I get that Raskin's "oh, you probably made a mistake, let me do something else that I suspect is what you really meant" might even have worked for a bunch of other people too. But the idea that somehow Raskin had some sort of deep insight with stuff like this, rather than just a set of personal preferences that are like those of anyone else, is just completely wrong, I think.