To be fair, particularly with any user generated files (documents, photos, videos, whatever), a directory structure isn't necessarily the best way of doing things if your OS/filesystem can keep an indexed database of all the contents and you could assign tags and search it rapidly using the powerful computers we have at our disposal now.
Indeed. The files and programs tend to be found via the "search" button in your device (with the appropriate tracking being sent to the mothership, of course!)
A directory structure offloads the work of searching and categorising to the user, but is necessarily restrictive in terms of classification (unless you get into symlinking a lot). But documents can be usefully classified in many ways. Do you put Joe Blogg's Fishing Licence Application into the Bloggs folder, the Fishing Licence folder, or the Pending Applications folder.
I don't think it is very restrictive, but it surely requires one to think about an organizational system that works for him/her. My mother, for example, absolutely despised computers up to a very late stage in her life (early 60's) but had to cave in so she could get on with her interests. Despite being a user for about ten years now, she still has no concept of the physical location of files and directories on a disk but learned how to move her e-mails (together with the attachments) to different folders in Thunderbird. Although this abstraction works for her while within the Thunderbird application, she has a mental disconnect to remember or understand what happened when an attachment was saved to the disk, regardless of how many times I explained (and yes, I am a
very thorough and patient teacher). A younger user has the same disconnect happening.
Even the naming convention brings you back to a time where people actually used physical File cabinets and directory reference books to find things.
Most people only create documents where dumping them all in the same place and just searching for them is a perfectly useful, less work, and more flexible solution in the modern world.
And not only that, but documents, photos, etc. tend to be very ephemeral as they usually need to last on a device just enough to be "shared" with another app (Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, etc.)