That's for console use. Trees are useful for looking at the whole thing at once, much as it's easier to appreciate a real tree that way than by maintaining a list of the leaves and branching distances.

I'm a a researcher and my source material is ~50gb spread across ~50k hand-picked files with pretty arbitrary structure, plus another 4-5 times that in mirrors of other collections. Trees let me see things that I would overlook by reading lists all the time.

Right now I half-ass use some bioinformatics tools originally intended for cladistics and proteome research to visualize the collection. Some days I go looking for specific information or catalog what I have, other days I stumble across a cache of valuable data and might select hundreds of individual files.

Yeah I think it's obvious that graphical trees are prettier than they are effective user interfaces.

Broot is a good example of just how much effort goes into making nested structures easily navigable. Trees may be good for presentation but ultimately lists with indentation for nesting are for more navigable.

This translates to GUI concepts as well. Both Windows and MacOS show a few flat lists relative to the current directory rather than showing all nestings at once like a tree does.