@nikitonsky

I really like this as an install flow, because it's all about direct manipulation. The application is a thing that you can pick up and use. The applications folder may be a simple flat space, but if you put the Finder in spatial mode then you can arrange things however you like and rely on spatial memory.

Windows 3.x's Program Manager looked like the Finder, but it was an extra indirection layer. From Windows 95, Microsoft completely visually separated the thing that is the program in the filesystem from the thing that you click to launch the program and never regained that connection.

But the place it falls down is uninstallation. Modern apps are stateful. At a minimum, they will record window positions in User Defaults on macOS, but they may also safe other preferences there. They may have local caches of data. They may have documents that you'd want to keep (for example, images that another program can open) or ones that are explicitly linked to the program (such as savegames). When you uninstall a program on macOS, you drag it to the bin, but that just removes the program, not any of that other stuff.

I vaguely recall a BeOS derivative providing a hook for when things are moved out of folders that you could use to clean things up.