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Should have said s/standards/filesystems/g... :-)

I was reacting to the idea of APFS for macOS, as well as having yet another filesystem to deal with on external media that interacts with multiple computers (HDDs/SSDs/USB flash drives/etc.).

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Is moving data between computers that way a thing that non-technical people do often? FAT-formatted USB sticks seem to be good enough for that, but e-mail/Dropbox/file sharing/cloud sharing/AirDrop have much better UX for the average person.

Yes, it is a thing people do. The problem is, those non-technical people do not understand on-disk formats. (Nowadays, most USB sticks come preformatted as ExFAT.) There are also offline and low bandwidth situations. In healthcare it's common too thanks to HIPAA and nervous hospitals: let's say a patient wants to transfer a set of MRI or CT scan images/videos (typically provided on CD or DVD, in which case it's ISO9660, but sometimes USB stick - hopefully ExFAT but sometimes worse).

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