I strongly disagree with the article's assertion "take my word for it — it’s much easier to tell a computer “do this to every file in this folder” than to tell

I strongly disagree with the article's assertion "take my word for it — it’s much easier to tell a computer “do this to every file in this folder” than to tell it “first, find everything with this tag, then put those into a string, then do a thing to every file in this string…”" because in most reasonable filesystem API's that's exactly what you would do with folders - first, find everything matching this wildcard from this folder string, put these filenames in a list, and then do a thing do every file in this list... I don't see a fundamental difference, in both cases you're running an arbitrary query first to get a list of the file names or handles with a specific criteria.