Somewhere along the lines, we have built computer user experiences that bully people into trying to work how computers work, with tons of abstract concepts like "files" and "folders", applications that silo their data, difficult-to-understand application lifecycles and user interface paradigms and settings and so on. Worse is that power users and developers — the same people who have the power to do better — have come to believe that having to adapt to how computers work is an essential skill and not a failing of the computer itself.
The Mercury OS design linked is arguably a massive over-simplification of where computers need to be but some of the concepts really aren't far off what I would probably want to design myself: the idea that applications are really just exposing workflow elements and sane data APIs and not a concrete "thing" you have to interact with or care about directly, so that the user thinks about _what_ they are doing and not _how_ they have to do it.