Comparing the amount of effort that has been spent on distributed filesystems (where everything is managed under one hierarchy) to the usage of such systems, I'm going to say that it's a fundamental law of trying to organize things.
But really, I do think it's physics at play... or rather logistics.
Let's say you're trying to put together a 10PB storage system in a datacenter. If you're using 60 disk JBODs with 10TB drives, thats 600TB of raw space per 4U (or a max of 6PB per rack, or 12PB in 2 racks). Now realistically due to power, network gear, etc... instead of maxing out 2 racks, you'd probably split that into at least 4 (or more) racks. If you're Backblaze (see above), you split those 20 pods across 20 separate racks (and add more volumes, but that's another story).
But once you're at that level, for redundancy, you'd not only managing which disk data is written/replicated to, but also the JBOD/pod, and the rack (and the data center). So, at that point, you're not going to working with a "normal"/traditional file system. You could with ZFS define redundancies that would work like that, but realistically, because of the extra overhead, you're better off changing how you organize your data.
(Plus: ZFS isn't very good at expanding a filesystem with new storage. You can do it, but your pool ends up unbalanced and performance suffers. When you decide to have a 1+PB system, you normally want to have the ability to add more storage space, which means a different type of FS)