Tags and folders are a way to structure and organize your stuff, not a kludge. Tagging things, or placing them in containers (possibly also containing other containers) are valuable to add metadata and semantics to the entities.

In a way, placing things in folders is some kind of (hierarchical) tagging, in which those 'tags' (folder and file names) form a traversable path to the entity. Adding tags to entities adds another retrieval path to the objects.