A long time ago, around when I was first taking systems programming courses, I had this vision for a filesystem and file explorer that would do exactly what you say. I imagined an entire OS without any filepaths for user data (in the traditional, hierarchical sense). My opinion (both now and back then) was that tree structures as a personal data filing system almost always made more of a mess than it actually solved. Especially for non-techies.
Rather, everything would automatically be ingested, collated, categorized, and (of course) searchable by a wide range of metadata. Much of it would be automatic, but it would also support hand-tagging files with custom metadata, like project or event names, and custom "categorizers" for more specialized file types.
Depending on the types of files, you could imagine rich views on top -- like photos getting their own part of the system with time-series exploration tools, geolocation, and person-tagging with face recognition, or audio files being automatically surfaced in a media library, with heuristics used to classify by artist, genre, etc. But these views would be fundamentally separate from the underlying data, and any mutations would be stored as new versions on top of underlying, immutable files, making it easy to move things between views or upgrade the higher level software that depended on views.
This was years ago, and I never got around to doing any of that (it would've been a massive project that likely would've fallen flat on its face). And now, in a roundabout kind of way, we've ended up with cloud-based systems that accomplish a lot of what I had imagined. I'd go so far as to say that local filesystems are quickly becoming obsolete for the average computer-user, especially those who are primarily on phones and tablets. It's a lot more distributed across 3rd party services than what I had in mind, but that at least makes it "safer" from being lost all at once (despite numerous privacy concerns).