The only thing I would add to the above discussion is that however you do this, consider whether you want your method to “find anything quickly, and lose absolutely nothing” to be dependent upon any specific software, file system, or even operating system.
As with many of you, I have been doing this in both a professional/business and personal setting for around three decades now. The folders/files that I organized using the old “8.3” naming system of DOS in the late 1980s, which then went into Windows and are now in Mac OS, are still understandable to me today. I regard Spotlight and other similar capabilities as excellent tools (especially as a last resort), but have seen enough changes over the years to try preserve as much flexibility as possible.
As an example, consider how to organize your family photographs. We love having them on all of the various Macs, iPad pros, iPad minis, phones, etc. that occupy our home. In the mid-2000s I digitized 36 traditional paper photo albums containing about 6,000 pictures. Since then, using various digital cameras, iPhones, etc., over time, my family photo collection has grown to around around 12,000 photographs. I suspect this is about typical for folks my age.
Now, although the native Mac/IOS Photos apps are very useful in countless respects, the organizational concepts embodied within them of “Moments,” “Memories,” “Locations,” “Years,” etc. for a picture I digitalized on a scanner in Windows in 2005 of my paternal grandfather taken in 1938 are less so. To be sure I can do a face recognition search and find some pictures, but that is limited in countless ways - like finding out “What did grandma’s house look like after the 1952 flood”. I suspect I could go through each of those those 12,000 files adding tags and modifying metadata to get them to sort right within the Apple ecosystem…but being retired I’m pretty lazy and so I think not.
So my “real” photographs are actually separate, and organized very simply as follows:
(i) JPEGS (no matter what format Apple now converts them into when imported into the Photos app);
(2) stored in “albums” (folders) that make sense to me - for my immediate family, by year taken (“2005”), for my extended family, by person or couple (“John and Linda Doe”); and
(3) within those albums by names that sort chronologically, are understandable in other file systems, and are searchable (“2001-05-01 Trip to Disneyland - Johnnie Doe”);
Now, although those “real” photos are also imported into the Mac/IOS Photos apps for the purpose of display (and organized there in the same fashion), those are not the actual collection - it stands apart.
The point to this is not the specifics but the underlying principle of how to organize personal files of any kind. As much as I love them, my photographic collection is not dependent upon anything Apple did yesterday, does today, or decides to do tomorrow. It is not dependent upon any proprietary software. It works on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian/Linux, and (I hope) will “work” with whatever comes next in this ever-changing world.