Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.

Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.

While many did pick up on the idea, where were the shortcomings? Were the early graphics not enough to build the mental link. Was it the common grid view of icons. Was it the icon being an abstract thing you needed to open to see the contents instead of looking at it directly (as previews on the icon which came later), was it things opening in separate windows. It's not as though other more visually 'rich' methods to show a file system such as 3D or animated took off.

There's also the modern version that gets brought up occasionally where people who are using devices with mobile instead of desktop OSes apparently don't know how to work with file systems to manage data, and presumably they'd have even less exposure to the physical paper concept that inspired it.

The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.