This is a really nice summary of the history of Mac OS (in both its incarnations).

While Mac OS X in the mid-late 2000s may have been a technologically superior operating system to Classic Mac OS, it was never as easy to use. The loss of the spatial Finder [1] along with the very strong UI consistency of Classic Mac OS apps (including 3rd party apps) left non-power-users behind forever. However, like everyone else in the operating system space, Apple didn't have to care about that because the browser took over and these users stopped doing things in native apps.

Classic Mac OS still can't be beat for working on projects in visual media. The persistence of the spatial Finder is so rock-solid that you can develop muscle memory for where icons will appear on the screen when you open a folder. This allows you to anticipate where they will be and move the mouse toward them before you can even see them (the zooming rectangles animation helps with this).

This method of working exemplifies the core philosophy of what the "desktop metaphor" was all about: having a spatial relationship with documents and tools on a physical desk lets you move your hands and eyes independently, grabbing and interacting with things without having to look at them. Apple worked extremely hard to bring this "illusion" to the Mac OS and no other operating system (including Mac OS X in all its versions up to the present day) has achieved this.

That's because the spatial illusion is very fragile and must be maintained with extreme care. Any loss of persistence (a window opening in a different place, an icon that moved or changed colour) shatters the illusion and puts the user into a defensive, "hunt and click" mode. Imagine cooking or working in a workshop and having someone re-arrange all your utensils or tools while you're away. Your entire workflow gets disrupted and your performance suffers.

Power users survived this disruption (in Mac OS X onwards) by moving to the keyboard and the Terminal, which have the rock-solid physical persistence of the keyboard itself to back them. Any time Apple tried to mess with the keyboard they got a ton of pushback from power users (see the touchbar on older MacBook Pros).

[1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm