[xg15]

Wild guess... but this sounds like the drive letter isn't really a feature but actually an implementation detail leaking through that they are trying to dress up as a feature. At least that would explain their insistence on users hiding the drive instead of removing it.

I believe, previously they just had a daemon running on the client PC that synced a local folder with the cloud storage. (Like Dropbox)

Now they seem to have switched to some sort of "fuse-but-on-windows" virtual device driver that accesses the cloud storage directly and presents it locally as a virtual drive. (Like OneDrive)

Would this make sense?

[noisem4ker]

That's exactly what it is, and what the old Google Drive File Stream was.

Reading the comments here and in the linked forums, it seems I'm one of the few used to how Google Drive File Stream worked, and most of the complaints are coming from people more used to the folder-based variant, which has been now shoehorned into the other paradigm.

[ncann]

I think so. I'm totally not familiar with the pros and cons of mounted drives but I assume there are some operations that are possible or easier to do when it's a mounted virtual drive vs a plain folder? Something related to file streaming where you need to detect that a file is accessed on the fly and "stream" it if it's not already available on local disk?