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if most of the files you care about are photos, do you need to care how the fs works

I think the problem arises when you need to walk outside of a specific app ecosystem (where all the various different apps know how to talk to one another and find each others' files), and now your lack of understanding of the underlying system makes it difficult for you to actually do anything. I was scrolling through the comments and came upon this one:

@_EyeOfTheTiger: It’s all fun and games until you’re trying to do anything important like your taxes, passport renewal, citizenship applications etc and now you have to dig through WhatsApp, Messages, Mail and the Photos app to scavenge for these important documents. Guess what 9/10 it will leave you feeling frustrated.

Now, one probably shouldn't be doing anything involving bunches of documents on a phone, but maybe that or a tablet is just all you've got, and we could come up with other examples.

For photos - why do you care about them? You're presumably not just hoarding thousands to be buried with as grave goods eventually, you're going to be doing stuff with these photos, like sharing them with family members and friends. And this works fine as long as you remain within the particular ecosystem (which is probably what Apple wants you to do on their hardware anyway) - one friend sends you one photo on a specific messaging app and you resend it to another friend. But what if the first friend is on one app, and the second friend is on another - now you need to dig out wherever the first app saves files to, and hope that the second app allows you to actually select files from there? What if, let's say, a younger sibling sends you some cute photo of their kid, and you want to resend it to your parents so they can see their grandkid, but they're old and don't actually use any social media, so your only form of digital communication with them is via email - again, you need to actually dig out the file itself, not just access it via the specific app.

The automatic discovering of files so they can be shown in the UI can also backfire in some cases - my (not an i)phone insists on showing me a bunch of the music I have in the Gallery app and as options when sharing photos, since it's technically music videos I've downloaded rather than just pure audio files. Why are the Gallery and other apps even scanning the Music folder in the first place? And UIs designed for this are also miserable to use - like yes, Mr. Jobs, just dumping every single photo I have in a linear list so that I have to scroll for several years instead of going Documents -> Photos -> specific folder with the specific photos from the specific event I actually care for, because I've organized my files properly is exactly what I think of when I hear the word "intuitive"! Now, that's why modern gallery apps generally have various album features, but again, that ties you into the ecosystem - if I want to exit that ecosystem, and migrate my files elsewhere, I just get the plain files, not the organization of those files into albums/collections/whatever-they-call-them-in-this-specific-app which only exists within the specific program - and thus I'm stuck with an unnavigable mess.

And tying people to ecosystems like this is bad - like, maybe if we were in some cyber-Soviet future where we just had "the state's photo app" and "the state's email app", and they were all designed to work properly with an intuitive UI since there wasn't a financial incentive to shovel ads and other bullshit everywhere - but in the current capitalist hellscape, this leaves users completely at the mercy of corporations to not overreach and screw them over. Want to switch to a different system since our recent updates have been making everything worse, and we just stealthily amended our EULA to allow AI training on your highly personal family photos? Well, tough shit, all your photos are here, all your documents are here, and you can only ever access them through our apps!