Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.

Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.