"Export considered harmful"
Because software rarely operate on "files in folders" anymore, "export" is increasingly the way software exposes data. But usually you don't want a dead snapshot; you want to "use this data elsewhere"—which requires repeatedly exporting & reconciling.
Conversation
Say I make an app for annotating papers. An old-fashioned way to do this would be to make a desktop app which views PDF files and writes annotations into the file. Now Spotlight can see them; Zotero can display them; etc. But SaaS must "import" the PDF and "export" annotations.
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But "export annotations" is not the same as "save annotations" because now if I add more annotations to the PDF, I must export them again, and then reconcile that new export with whatever downstream tools used the old data. This gets much worse in the bi-directional case!
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Consider also Zotero: it's native software, but it's designed to manage your papers' files internally. You can export individual PDFs elsewhere, but changes made to that PDF won't be reflected within the app. Contrast this with "Zotero is a viewer for a (nested) folder of PDFs".
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Like Obsidian!
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Replying to
Yes, this is the most important design property Obsidian has, I think.