I personally hold the view that it could have been better and that a more general notion of persistent object (not in the OOP sense) would've been better from a user facing pov.
The filesystem is doing more than one job, holding multiple responsibilities and imposing a way to present data and how to store it.
Users would much rather work with logical items. A "photo" which includes metadata, photo files, photo edits, ratings, face/object detections, and etc. as a single "thing". A tweet thread. A blog post on Medium or in WordPress. A Google Doc or Sheet.
The question is how do you provide that seamless "anywhere, anytime" experience while keeping that data as local to the device as possible? Files by themselves just can't solve that. There needs to be a protocol, a data format, and mobile OS support.
There was also the open-source alternative, OpenDoc[2] that never got anywhere... this has been tried and just doesn't work.
The only thing that seems to work is media-types on the Internet... with the browser as the universal viewer/processor... but as it is currently, it's hard to make it better than what we have.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding