Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those

Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them. IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now." I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)