Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs

I believe the author does say that conflating is bad design.

And the point of looking at design patterns is that one shouldn't expect to predict things like CDROMs, sockets, and network filesystems. Instead of trying to list all the ways your thing will be used, just follow certain patterns and things will work out by themselves. Even if you can't see, or there doesn't exist, any present downside to conflating two designs, don't conflate them anyway and you will be more successful.

We may still be able to excuse Thompson and Ritchie with a hindsight argument by saying that the way things looked at the time, creating a filesystem image and adding it to the namespace were fundamentally a single gestalt, and it is only since then that we have learned to think of it as two things.