Do you use this feature a lot? I have used macOS for over 15 years straight, and I do not think I have ever tagged a file once. What purpose does it even serve? You get some color code, but what does that truly accomplish? I assume most people that use such a feature have some kind of mental map?
If you're doing work on many files within different folders in a project folder, and this work takes several days. You finish the files in one folder and tag it with a color as "done", then move on to the next folder, etc.
I use it extensively to keep track of the status of my work. I draw comics, and each page is a separate file; while I'm generally working on one of the highest-numbered pages in the folder, it's real nice to instantly know by their visible tag colors that, say, pages 1-78, 80, and 82 are complete, while 79, 81, and 83-85 are in progress.
You can see an example of that here: https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/01/06/how-i-work-file-org... - it's got a screenshot of the folder of pages for a comic I was doing that had two parallel narratives, so scrolling down to the bottom of the alphabetized list wouldn't even necessarily show all the in-progress files. (Yes, I could sort by other criteria, but stuff like 'last modified date' can bring in a lot of false positives.)
I have a saved search for files marked as "in progress". And another one for files marked as both "commissions" and "in progress". All of these files might be scattered throughout my file system in various places - comics have their own folder, personal work goes in a folder named with the year, commissions sometimes end up in the yearly folder, sometimes in their own subfolder - and these saved searches let me completely disregard that and quickly ask myself "what do I feel like spending time on today".
I also have a lot of files tagged as "experiments", all saved in the yearly folder. A lot of these are the result of me sitting there on the Illustrator subreddit and answering "how do I make Illustrator do something that looks like this" questions, and packaging them up in an easy-to-reuse way; I can just look in the Experiments tag when I want to find one of them and not bother keeping a special place for them.
I don't think there's any kind of mental map going on here, the whole usefulness of tags is that I can skip navigating my folder hierarchy. Different tags very clearly mark some files as different. You can make new tags and assign them names, but you're annoyingly restricted to seven colors, so there's really not much mental mapping to do.
