Learned readers will ask themselves: so why use an unbalanced tree instead of balanced one, which offers better asymptotic times en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-balancing_binary_search_tree?
Likely:
- the maximum number of entries is small enough due to memory size limitations, that we won't waste too much memory with the root directory entry
- different entries would have different levels, and thus different access times
- tree rotations would likely make caching more complicated