Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
I’m simply baffled that someone going into a computer engineering major at a university doesn’t understand a hierarchical file system as a matter of course. It’s a tree. The file system is a tree. A tree is one of the most basic computer science logical constructs. How exactly is a filesystem confusing? How is navigating directories from a terminal - any terminal, in any OS - a Herculean task?