The calendar example is from the article, their suggestion is "Event"! But also, yeah that's a weak choice for me to pull from.

I guess my point is "File" is just consistent, not that it accurately represents the way the application functions. A lot of UX conversations come down to the naive-user experience, but truth be told, you're only a naive user for a short amount of time. Maybe a week into using macOS for example, I think you'll just mentally map "File" to that list of actions I have in my comment, and you're golden.

Yeah maybe conceptually it's weird that "New Tab" in safari is a File action... but also that's where every application puts its "New Thing" actions. If I want the application to give me a blank slate, I will look for File > New *. "File" is just a word.

If every application had it's own place for those actions that were named for the noun they act on, sure, the naive user touching a desktop OS for the first time is going to breeze through tasks a tiny bit faster, at the expense of the location/name/grouping of menu items now requiring relearning on an app-by-app basis.

There's an alternate history where the file menu is actually labled "Do" or something, and I would make the same argument. "I know what's in the Do menu."