Personally I used to use the saved search feature in macOS which is much more convenient than aliases or symlinks. You can specify what to search for and then save them. The files themselves can have arbitrary text based metadata just by writing Spotlight comments for the files. For example for screenshots, I write in the spotlight comments things like from which app I took the screenshot and why I took this screenshot ("funny" or "delightful UI") and then I have a saved search that only searches for PNG files in the Screenshots folder with keyword "funny" (you get the idea). The actual files are of course still organized in folders by year just like the author.