The idea that Apple are experts in UI/UX has to stop. Nobody should be copying them.
Or to people in different age brackets: for a few years now, people have finished uni while doing all their work on phones and tables without a desktop OS involved. No files, no desktop, no actual applications. We should stop copying desktop mentalities into modern workflows.
Or the other way around: nobody has desks or paper folders in file cabinets anymore, nobody needs to physically handle files and organise them, nor do their have boxes for physical mail that comes "in" and goes "out". We should stop copying legacy office concepts into software.
Knowing how to store, organise and retrieve information, regardless of what system is used (including computers, file cabinets and archive rooms) is a skill that doesn't just magically appear in your brain, you have to actually observe, trial or classically learn about it to make use of it. It used to be through day-to-day tasks and a growth in responsibilities when growing up that people got that skill semi-automatically, but that is no longer the case.
Most systems have or used to have tagging functionality as well, but apparently that wasn't used all that much either for information classification and organisation.
Granted, I can't read minds and I don't know what everyone everywhere does, but I do see large scale changes in employee instructions for new hires, university hires and even in cross-org/education projects. For most young/new people, their phone was their first 'computer' and the 'default' environment, and a desktop is the anomaly. People looking up how to do things on ticktock is not a funny meme, it's reality and seriously tainting the knowledge of junior hires on the lower end jobs (like entry level service desk backoffice). Knowing where to find authoritative information, how to verify it, and how to use that as a reference to validate and find other information seems to be a foreign concept to some as well. Even something like a somewhat specific google search or wikipedia article and the references it can supply are not as normal as one might think, and the gap is getting bigger, not smaller.
When they want to find stuff, they just search for it in the file picker. Or hopefully the file picker is just already in the right place. Often this UX is kinda bad, and it's hard to find things. Sometimes they give up, and either do without, or (if applicable) visit a website to just re-download whatever they can't find. Or they ask a technically-adept friend to help them.
Carefully creating a directory hierarchy and actively picking and choosing where to put things when downloading or saving files is just not a thing most people do.
They aren't morons. They don't necessarily understand all the complexities, like aliased folders, etc., but that's because they don't need to and so haven't tried.
But parent is right. Nobody is out here maintaining and pruning their beautiful directory hierarchy, and complaining about how messy applications make their home directory. Because nobody turns on “show hidden files”. Nobody cares.
These are organizational concepts, not software concepts. People, even mobile uni students, have and must master them. As a result they get reinvented constantly in/as apps.
What people are mad about is people are told 'this is how you will organize' rather than just learning to organize. It is absolutely fucking stupid.
So actually the problem is worse. Apple is schizophrenic about folders and leaves their users with the cognitive dissonance.