am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.


All files are references. But you have always been able to put a reference to one file in multiple folders by using hard links.
find dir1 dir2 dir3 -name '*.x' -type fYep. Even NT was doing it for decades. Though it was pretty discouraged on the Microsoft side.