I've thought of something like this, glad to see its been created. Love it. This is how I 'picture' things in my head so it makes it easy for me to organize. Now only if there was a file explorer like this I'd love to use one.
For organising information Temin has been an entirely positive experience for me. For the first time what's in my head matches what's on a screen.
Early on I expected that mental model to fall over as the amount information in a metaverse grew, but I have ~12,000 sticky notes/pieces of paper in my 'main' metaverse and haven't personally felt the need to add any search functionality yet. I'm honestly not sure if I know where everything is, or just how to get back to it. Speaking to a neuroscientist or similar would be great - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_memory#Current_theories
I'd also be keen to speak to anyone who has thoughts on Temin as a graph, as more recently I've been finding sticky notes mean multiple things and belong in multiple locations. https://temin.co.uk/#links does a rather poor job of explaining my current solution.
Regarding your question about why this works : I urge you to read at least the first chapter of Frances Yates The Art of Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory - how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I've started to read it. It's nice to get some history and depth to concepts I had some awareness of.
I do wonder how method of loci strategies stand up to bricks and mortar sticky note use in collaborative environments. In my day job I've felt other people moving and adding things to a wall as almost destructive if I didn't experience it happening (purely in terms of memory). As changes in Temin are written to a ledger a fringe benefit is you can play back what's happened while you were gone, which seems to sooth that.
For work, I also spend a lot of time writing/drawing/thinking with a pen, and most of the artefacts in my metaverse are created with a Wacom not a keyboard. Being able to remember where things are I put down to Temin, being able to remember what's there I put down in some part to that. I'm not going to trying to convert people who prefer to use keyboards, and I expect pen-first users will very much be a minority, but the research on retention when it comes to pen vs. keyboard is pretty compelling.