[Sharlin]

The author finds the My Computer/Explorer dichotomy strange, but to me the aim always felt perfectly clear. Reducing the visual clutter and mental overhead of the directory tree in the ”casual user” mode, while still providing a more powerful mode for advanced users. Windows 95 also hid file extensions, as well as hidden and system files, by default. This design direction to abstract away filesystem details has, of course, continued over the years, especially on mobile OSs—although recently even Apple, begrudgingly, has admitted that maybe the concept of ”files” is useful even on iOS, after all.

[WorldMaker]

It would have been more interesting a dichotomy if the "Folder view" was truly a spatial navigation system, which it seems like it wanted to be but never committed to.

It seems a shame that all OSes today seem to have given up on spatial navigation.