Apple has repeatedly over the years attempted to create interfaces where knowing where the actual data was saved was no necessary to using and finding that data. iTunes, iPhoto, most of iOS.
It’s usually met with a lot of resistance from people who have carefully and painstakingly crafted their perfect file hierarchies and hate it when Apple messes with that.
Some of the content recognition stuff in this seem pretty interesting, but I’m not sure that “everything in a single folder with preview thumbnails turned on” would be less “frustrating” for me than the current finder paradigm. This seems like it’s aiming for the iOS photos interface but for all of your files. In general I find searching for one specific photo in that interface to be more frustrating than knowing a hierarchy it would have been saved under. But for finding recent photos and finding a cluster of temporally related photos it is better. Is that a paradigm that works for all files too? For recents probably, but I’m not sure I often look for temporally related files. Still, this is a neat looking program/project, and like I said the content recognition stuff does seem interesting.
Time is merely the default order. You can also sort by what the document says. The amount. The date printed on it. Who it's from. So a receipt search isn't "when did I save this" it is "the $1200 one from March." That's what makes it work beyond photos, where all you have is time and place.