This shows what a steamimg pile of incoherent features and behaviours the Windows Explorer has been gradually turned into since Windows 7. It is quite hard for average users to coax that tool into showing an actually honest content of some directory on the hard drive. There are so many abstractions, redirections, alternative view and on the fly translations (only obvious with languages other than English) in there that the very thing it is supposed to be good at becomes cumbersome and error prone. And you cannot easily disable all these things that just tend to get in the way.
If anyone who is working on that program reads this: please rein in this madness and turn the Explorer back into a decent and simple file manager without abstactions and lies to the usera
I agree with your main point, but putting the cutoff at Windows 7 is extremely generous. Already by then it was doing absolutely insane things like hiding the actual name of the "Program files" folder and instead showing the localized name.
Let me explain: in Swedish Windows, for instance, "C:\Program Files" was traditionally called "C:\Program" since Windows 95. (Here is where the ACTUAL mistake was made that has turned into technical debt ever since -- why in the name of hell would you LOCALIZE the FILENAME of a SYSTEM FOLDER?)
Anyway, lots of installers aren't locale aware and assume "Program Files" so it used to be that most Swedish users had some software installed in "C:\Program" and some in "C:\Program Files" and it was a total mess. Microsoft "solved" this by having Explorer show "C:\Program" but under the hood it is actually "C:\Program Files". The mind boggles, truly.
Then there's the whole "Libraries" vs "Folders" fiasco, don't get me started...
For me, it's been straight downhill since Windows 98 started hiding the contents of system folders by default.
Microsoft seems to think users are idiots. And often they are. But you can't help these people, every solution they come up just creates more idiots who don't know how it works. Some point soon we'll all be idiots who don't know how anything works anymore.
Maybe you can make computers easier to use by providing abstracted, context-dependent views of the data instead. Mobile phones rely on that prerty successfully. But they also do not merge these views with the single file manager the system has. Therein lies the true madness of the Windows Explorer in my oppinion.
If you want to have a view for the barely computer literate average user, (ab-)use the myriad predefined folders in the user profiles and create a launcher for dummies that starts a comtact manager for the address book, a photo gallery for the photos and so on. And hide a file manager in this set of tools that has no stupid extras like forced OneDrive integration and Libraries.
Mobile iOS don't abstract complexity; they don't have complexity. Mobile apps are just silo's that can barely communicate with each other. Nobody working on a PC wants that.
You cannot simultaneously give people the power to work on files between multiple apps, organize them how they want, and make it as dumb as iOS. You want to zip up your photos and email them to your boss? Good luck getting your photo gallery to do that.
How many smartphone users do even know what a zip file is? I'm fairly certain that at least 70% don't and that is an optimistic estimate. Even more, I think that almost every advanced use case relies on some deeper than average knowledge that the user must have about how some particular technological thing works. This means that at least 70% or 80% of users likely won't even understand what that use case is even about.
Quick Access (aka Favorites) has been around since XP and default on in Explorer since Vista, though yes some of the views have changed after 7, this particular bug is possible in Vista and 7.
The Windows Explorer being an "object explorer" that doesn't necessarily show physical objects but can also show logical objects that are "folder-like" is a design/architecture that dates back all the way to Windows 95 (and has always been seen in places like the old Control Panel).
"Gradually turned into since Windows 7" is pretty much "has always been since Windows 95", sorry to say.
If anyone who is working on that program reads this: please rein in this madness and turn the Explorer back into a decent and simple file manager without abstactions and lies to the usera