It’s little bit like when Linnaeus figured out a way to name all plants: By having an all-encompassing system like this it’s possible to have a “semantic anchor” that relates to a more or less arbitrary aspect of reality, that can be used to describe the environment of that anchor better and to orient oneself within one’s world. In other words: Having a system like this (it could also take on the shape of a network or a tag cloud or whathaveyou) allows for a holistic view. In a picture: It relates a map to a territory by putting up street signs in the real world that can be found in the map.
Secondly an easy naming scheme makes it possible to take the possibility of order anywhere. That means two things: 1) I can use the system for anything, since it doesn’t express the essence of the thing, it’s just (if very important) metadata. 2) I can use it anywhere where I can write something down. Any app on any of my devices, but also real-life folders for real-life paper, for example.
Thirdly the system itself has emergent properties as it connects things that I would have not connected consciously. It’s serendipitous in that way. This means at a certain tipping point a holistic system like this starts to work for you, especially for theoretically inclined people that like to write a lot of notes like me.
True!
The cool thing is that having a system like this negates the need to only rely on one app. It of course still makes sense to maybe not use OmniOutliner, Dynalist and Workflowy at the same time, but it’d be possible - opening up this room of platform agnosticism frees you from the need to find the app™. Apps are just implementation details or articulations of the general system which itself is not reified as an app or a collection of apps anymore. There might be a present setup, but exchanging apps or changing whole workflows doesn’t change the order of the tree, which makes it a reliable conceptual tool.