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 didn’t say it was good, but it is easy to use compared to a terminal. It won’t help you find your file, but it’s somewhat intuitive to a novice user - you click around and open folders until you find something that looks like what you’re after. It’s not efficient, it’s downright tedious, but it’s at least easy to do.
It’s all about the barrier to entry to novice users. Most users are novices, they’re the majority of the market so they’ll decide what the market leader is.