It is an insufficient abstraction because it gives you less power as a user. Same with everything on iOS. This sadly creeps into MacOS too.
If a table of contents it is a good analogy depends on what you define as content. For me the content is all the files.
A generic way to view data content is a file explorer that lets you explore the file system. Some abstractions can be here too, but it shouldn't be too much and certainly not to a degree like iOS. I can understand why it is there, it is a consumer device primarily.
If you have more than 10 documents, how do you organize them by topic? Into a new folder? Thought as much...
