You're (basically) talking about a combination of

1. saving data with metadata instead of simply filenames ... which I've been tearing my hair out over in frustration for the better part off a quarter of a century now — have you seen all the different columns you can select for a Windows folder view and then asked yourself why you can't actually store any of the relevant tags in any of the files?. *sigh*

and

2. the Zeitgeist search engine (https://zeitgeist.freedesktop.org/) — if only it were up to the job *sigh*

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For a while I was excited by the DBFS feature of the Dolphin filemanager, but it only worked with KDE ... thus rendering it useless as a universal solution ... and it has since been (more or less) abandoned, so you can't even use it with KDE any more either (not as was originally promising to be anyway).

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What's required is a universal, crossplatform, DBFS filesystem with Zeitgeist-like logging of activities as well as simply stored data with randomly generated, unique filenames (that are opague to the user, because they are only important to the file/operating system) and save/open dialogs that oblige the user to enter meaningful metadata instead — I don't care whether the letter from the solicitor I'm searching for came as an email and/or attachment, text, IM, or a physical letter that I scanned and saved (or, in that latter case, whether I saved is a gif, jpg or even where I put it), what I want to do is open letter+from+<name of>solicitor+re+divorce+from+<name of bane of my life>

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As for the whole not needing to crash out of an app or view ... Phantom OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_OS) was a step in that direction but, sadly still only in alpha (iirc, over ten years after I first read about it).