I actually find unix worse here, as I rarely care about where the binary is (and `which` will happily tell me on the rare occasions that I do), but I often need to find various supporting files. Are they in /usr/share? /usr/local/share? /opt/fooprog? (in the olden days /usr/X11R6/share, or many other variants).
What are the equivalent locations for windows ? Also almost all programs installed via the package manager will use the same paths. If you are installing a package manually, then things get more.. interesting.
In fairness, program files, templates, docs, settings, and examples on Windows are often in some mix of
C:/Program Files (x86)/VendorName/FooProg
C:/Users/Me/AppData/Local/FooProg
C:/Users/Me/My Documents/FooProg/
C:/VendorName/FooProg (I'm looking at you, AMD)
The registry (which is sorta like /etc, and often abused to store stuff like recent searches, etc)
Linux is definitely worse on that front I agree, but let's not pretend Windows is super-consistent about file locations. I only say this after much frustration recently trying to find things.
Is it coherent? I think the whole point of that post was that it's not obvious where things should go and different people have different opinions on that. For a newcomer, learning the Linux filesystem takes years and can never truly be perfected for the above reasons.
It would take days to learn where things are supposed to go, in the opinion of the person writing the documentation. Where things actually go in the real world varies from distro to distro and application to application. And just when you think you have it down, you try to find where that new app just installed to, and you begin the process again.
And when you finally figure it out, Fedora moves everything to /usr.
You can't blame *nix for having too much choice. Especially when it's coherent.