I'm like that, and I really do believe I have "grasped the basic file operations"; maybe I just have a better grasp of the basic concepts of search, but I guess that's not the case, either; I have it like this because it fits my needs and preferences and works better, quicker, smoother for me, and in my case it's the result of decades of refining the way I use computers. Other people have different needs and preferences and that's absolutely fine as well, as far as I'm concerned. My "messy desktop" approach seems to be almost unbearable to some few people, though, and some very few seem to find it so unbearable that they have been outright aggressive about this in the past, and I really don't get that at all. But in case someone who feels like that reads this, here's my rationale:

I pretty much never ever see my desktop. I see my screensaver all the time, desktop never. I use spaces to separate tasks I'm working on and arrange windows to fill the screen, and they pretty much always do. I use the desktop mostly as a drop-off area for whatever it is I momentarily need; I drag and drop stuff there all the time, like images from Firefox. There are some directories, but at most two layers deep I think. I do archive stuff from time to time, but there are pretty much always multiple desktop grids worth of stuff on there.

That works really well because I only ever interact with the desktop via Finder (where I can just type the beginning of a name or use the datetime column or Spotlight set to search current directory per default), CLI (which has fd, ag etc.) or file pickers, though I tend to drag-and-drop more than I use "open file" dialogs. Relying on those is much faster and more intuitive for me than thinking up some kind of organisation scheme for dozens of unrelated activities that don't seem to fit into a single scheme very well, and organising everything accordingly, when I'm in the "zone" and would rather not have to think about where to place this particular file. I find it hard to remember such schemes, but I pretty much always know when and how I created something, so a chronological view of everything at once is very helpful. Software work is somewhat more organised (~/workspace and a lot of git repos in there), and data sets are very neatly organised (it doesn't work any other way), but most other things live somewhere on the desktop (or in some kind of searchable cloud).

As I see it, as long as I find whatever I need quickly, which I do, why would I "tidy up" those imaginary "folder" things? It's not like they have much in common with physical ordering aids (like folders), where you have to structure things rigidly or else never find a thing, and even there, you often don't structure things very deeply – who puts physical folders inside folders inside folders? My hand tools are organized pretty neatly, but if I could just say "8mm wrench" in the direction of my toolbox and magically hold it in my hand, or magically have all my tools neatly arranged by name, date-of-purchase, type, or just say "wrench for that nut" and find it ... I daresay my toolbox would be a lot messier. Can't do that, so I must put in the work. Where I don't have to, and can keep the chaos out of sight, I won't.