[hire_charts]

A long time ago, around when I was first taking systems programming courses, I had this vision for a filesystem and file explorer that would do exactly what you say. I imagined an entire OS without any filepaths for user data (in the traditional, hierarchical sense). My opinion (both now and back then) was that tree structures as a personal data filing system almost always made more of a mess than it actually solved. Especially for non-techies.

Rather, everything would automatically be ingested, collated, categorized, and (of course) searchable by a wide range of metadata. Much of it would be automatic, but it would also support hand-tagging files with custom metadata, like project or event names, and custom "categorizers" for more specialized file types.

Depending on the types of files, you could imagine rich views on top -- like photos getting their own part of the system with time-series exploration tools, geolocation, and person-tagging with face recognition, or audio files being automatically surfaced in a media library, with heuristics used to classify by artist, genre, etc. But these views would be fundamentally separate from the underlying data, and any mutations would be stored as new versions on top of underlying, immutable files, making it easy to move things between views or upgrade the higher level software that depended on views.

This was years ago, and I never got around to doing any of that (it would've been a massive project that likely would've fallen flat on its face). And now, in a roundabout kind of way, we've ended up with cloud-based systems that accomplish a lot of what I had imagined. I'd go so far as to say that local filesystems are quickly becoming obsolete for the average computer-user, especially those who are primarily on phones and tablets. It's a lot more distributed across 3rd party services than what I had in mind, but that at least makes it "safer" from being lost all at once (despite numerous privacy concerns).

[kalleboo]

Part of that is kind of what Apple has been going for the past couple of years with macOS, even though they haven't gone all onboard by removing the hierarchical part (since there is so much legacy software and users would revolt).

A new user profile will come with a prominent "All my files" live search shortcut that just shows all your files in a jumble sorted by when you last used them. Then they expect you to search and filter through them by metadata (which is automatically extracted/indexed by Spotlight). Then you can save these searches/filters as saved searches which are live-updating virtual folders.

[pls2halp]

If you were new to modern macOS(and iOS with the Files app) you might end up with something similar. Applications dump things in the main Documents folder(with user chosen names, but those are necessary metadata). You can then tag items with various labels(essentially adding more metadata), and everything is searchable through spotlight of the search function of our file manager using the user-given name, tags, and metadata(documents edited today, Pages files).

Photos and videos are managed entirely in the photos app, and organised almost exactly according to your suggested categories(literally called memories (for events), places, people). iTunes handles audio files automatically(you can sync your own files into apple music, where they're categorised in the same way as any other music).

As I understand it, APFS also handles copying and modifying in a similar way to your description, where a copy of a file is treated as a mutation of the previous version.

Everything is even synced through iCloud to all your devices, with all macOS devices keeping a rather complete copy, unless they run out of disk space.

This would require someone to have their first experience of computing in the modern Apple ecosystem(literally iOS 11 and up) to avoid preconceptions about filesystems, since traditional folders are still supported, but it's possible.