[spatulon]

The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder on disk could only be open in a single window, and that window remembered its position and layout, there was a certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency and stability you expect of real-world objects.

Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder.

This article goes into a lot more detail. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

[kitsunesoba]

Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very strong — humans are generally quite good at remembering where things are in physical space, retaining such information more easily than we do abstract information like file paths.