I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. I'm pointing this out because the mobile first and web first world droppe

I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. I'm pointing this out because the mobile first and web first world dropped the ball on this incredibly badly. Every webapp is an isolated silo with weird logins and no proper offline usage whatsoever. To share a small anecdote, I recently asked a non-technical acquaintance how they would share a Word document from their desktop computer: they said they'd email the file. Then I asked how they would share a note from their phone's notes app: they had no clue. Yes, implementation details bleed through: I can tell that Word operates on files and the notes app probably has some sqlite database under the hood, but ultimately it's about how we interact with data. Word operates on content you have, while the notes app operates on content it has. And this is where my flash drive test came from, not because I'm attached to inodes or directories, but because of the interaction model that decouples apps and data. If tomorrow I wake up in a world where ext4 has been replaced by Postgres as its file system, I wouldn't miss chmod or fsck. But I'd want to be sure I can still take a single object (a file!) and do actions with it - send it to somebody, delete it, copy it, all without it having some inseparable link to an app or a website.