Yes, I think "Gen Z doesn't understand file systems" is at least partially an indictment of file systems.

Hierarchy was always a poor substitute for tagging. You have to either decide a bunch of arbitrary parent / child relationships to encode your tags in a deep directory structure or just stuff them all into the file name and filter with regex.

I actually have similar frustrations with emacs org-mode. I get paralyzed by tree-structure decisions and I'm realizing that a tree structure is just not what I want. A flat collection of knowledge items festooned with every conceivable piece of metadata that might help me find them later is.