The idea was that metadata, for example a file’s label, would travel across to whichever device you use the network drive from.
Yeah, because such devices are only made by Apple and can or should understand Apple's internal format.
But classic Mac OS stored “Desktop DB” and “Desktop DF” at the root of each mounted drive, IIRC.
It seems like a better solution.
Putting in in the folder is also nice in that it naturally gets deleted when the folder is deleted
All file operations have been watched by Spotlight since forever at this point.
Except for ignored file types and folders you marked as private.
Or those on network volumes or removable media. When somebody else on other machine removes them, your local database is out of sync pronto.
This also happens with .DS_store files if the other computer on the network isn’t a Mac. It’s irrelevant.
computers other than a mac don’t need DS_Store anyways, so still relevant.
No, the objection to not keeping .DS_Store per folder and doing it per file system instead was that a non-Mac might make changes that would not be seen. The point is that this can already happen for a lot of different reasons! So keeping it per folder doesn't eliminate the failure mode, it just makes it slightly less common… at the cost of annoying all non-Mac users and any Mac user who needs to interact with Git etc. The tradeoff analysis for doing it per folder is bad.