It was also a royal pain in the ass to change the file type should you want to open the same file with another application, edit it, save it, then go back to the 1st application.
At that point I assume it's easier to open the file from each application rather than the finder. Which I appreciate isn't a great workflow, but probably simpler in that worldview.
On MacOS of that era, the files didn't even show up in the "Open..." dialogs of those other apps. Many of those apps didn't have a "Show all files" option.
Oh, I didn't realize it was that rigid. Yeah, that's an unfortunate system.
Isn't iOS still essentially the same way? It was one reason I stopped using iOS devices as I frequently wanted to open, for instance, pdf or image files from multiple apps.
Does IOS even have a file system? Last time I used it, I had to share files back and forth from one app to others just to open them. It was really annoying...
Most programs I used had import and export options for these situations
And to deal with storage media that don't support that metadata