I'm a data hoarder and I organize meticulously, so I get where you're coming from. But I often need to do searches along different dimensions than the "primary keys" I chose for organizing the directory structure. Search is indispensable for this.

As an example, say I have records related to my taxes - a bunch of documents and images - organized into directories by year, and I want to copy all of the images for the last 5 years out into a temporary directory so that I can flip through them easily. I can browse to my taxes directory, do a search for "kind:picture" then sort the results by modified date and drag the relevant items into the destination directory.

For some types of tasks this is so convenient that sometimes when I'm ssh'd into a server on my home network I'll move files into a mounted network share so that I can manipulate them from Windows Explorer. Clicking around a graphical file explorer is just way less cognitive overhead than stringing together a big command on the command line. Windows Explorer in the Windows 10 era isn't great, but it's much better than e.g. Finder or Thunar, which are my other options on my home computers.