That's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest.
The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.
I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:
He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything.
(and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)
My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl???
Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.
Also, you usually have context for the file. Like "Hey, can you send me this blueberry crumble recipe?".
I do this quite frequently. I know which person knows, I know I've asked them before and usually a quick keyword search is enough to find whatever I'm looking for again.
So this thing has at least two more information points I can search for to pinpoint the file than a simple file on my PC. It tells me who, and more context on what.
Yes, I think "Gen Z doesn't understand file systems" is at least partially an indictment of file systems.
Hierarchy was always a poor substitute for tagging. You have to either decide a bunch of arbitrary parent / child relationships to encode your tags in a deep directory structure or just stuff them all into the file name and filter with regex.
I actually have similar frustrations with emacs org-mode. I get paralyzed by tree-structure decisions and I'm realizing that a tree structure is just not what I want. A flat collection of knowledge items festooned with every conceivable piece of metadata that might help me find them later is.
That's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest.
The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.