What drove that home for me was when I went to the new local supermarket, they had a central path with perpendicular side paths with the shelves. Each of the side paths is numbered, so I know “organic” is in path 5,spices in 7, etc.
Then when someone recently mentioned JD, and I looked at it (again), it suddenly clicked for me. I am happy I adopted the JD system.
As for “cheating”, I did a bit of that when I started off setting up JD, but found it actually increased friction for me. The JD system forces you to think carefully whether a file is worth keeping and exactly in which location.