Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.
There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files.
But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.
I really liked it; I miss just... knowing where everything on my system lived, by feel. It was like the concept of a "memory palace", built into the system.
...until you consider attaching a large display to your laptop. And then detaching it after you have placed some stuff there.
Some of the impression I was given too was how much more important things like spatial navigation were for Mixed Reality usability according to research and usability studies. In three dimensions our brains much more crave that things we put into a place stay put in that place exactly where we put them.
(But yes, doing it in 2D even on a single monitor was harder than it sounds. Another real world example of complications is things like removable read only drives: where do you store its customization and position info and is that something that you can accidentally burn to the disc and then never override?)
Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.
I definitely do, as I find makes it quicker to find stuff as project grows in size.
The behaviour of Finder in MacOS (7.1 was my first version) of remembering the position of folders & files I never found that helpful, and in particular it made working on other peoples' machines really hard since you constantly wanted to clean-up or reorder to what made sense to you but didn't want to mess with their preferences (or their particular personal chaos, as it sometimes was).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
And an HN thread about it: