You've already gotten lots of good advice, particularly from CHG_CANON who, IMHO, is the resident Lightroom Classic expert.

Only a few things to add - One, don't be very worried that you'll mess things up with Lightroom Classic. Every visual change you make to a photo is recorded in a separate file so that the original photo remains unchanged. (Note that changes to EXIF data, like keywords or dates are recorded in the physical file.) It is possible to delete a photo permanently, but when you ask Lightroom to delete a photo, it will ask you if you want it deleted from the disk drive or just removed from the catalog. If you do the latter, the photo remains on your disk drive but you just won't see it in Lightroom Classic. You can always import it into Lightroom Classic again later.

Two, and this repeats what others have said, your actual folder structure and naming conventions that you use on your disk drive for the folders and files is not very important. The only situation under which that becomes important is if you were to stop using Lightroom Classic because then you will need to rely on that folder structure to find a particular photo.

And, lastly, Lightroom Classic gives you many orthogonal ways of organizing your photos. By orthogonal I mean that each way you organize is independent of the other way and each way you organize is hierarchical in nature. The first one of these is the actual folder structure. But because there are so many other ways to organize, it becomes less and less important. Another way to organize is to use Collections. Although a photo can be only in one physical location, e.g., a folder, it can be in many Collections. Collections can be grouped together into Collection Sets so that they also behave in a hierarchical fashion. Another way to organize is through keywording. Keywords can also be hierarchical. For example, I have a geographical set of keywords with countries at the highest level, then states or provinces, then cities, and in some cities particular buildings. As a result, when I assign the keyword Philadelphia to a photo, it automatically also gets the keywords Pennsylvania and USA. Finally, you can use Labels (shown as colors) and Stars to organize photos. How you use them is up to you. The advantage of these two organizing tools is that using them is very fast, a click or two per photo. Say I want to pick out 10 photos to send to someone, but I have several hundred to choose from. If I'm not currently using the yellow label, I might use that and as I browse through the several hundred candidates on my first pass, I can quickly label a subset with yellow. Then I filter to see only the yellow labeled ones and discover that I've still got 23 candidates. Now it is easy to compare these 23 with each other, and remove the yellow label from the ones I rule out until I eventually get down to the 10 I want.

Well you miss capability to logically organize your photos using keywords and collections and you lose the ability to filter images using metadata. I have several methods to easily find images I’m looking for by using keywords and metadata. As for editing, yes PS is more powerful, but it’s overkill for 99% of my editing that I can do much faster and easier in LR. And since LR is a parametric editor that only actually applies the changes to the displayed image or on export the original image is never changed. It’s a completely non-destructive workflow. I can create as many virtual copies as I want. I can edit an image several different ways, one original image with different sidecars that make up the virtual image. Really the masking tools have in LR have gotten so good that the only things I do in PS anymore are extending the canvas and cloning out objects.

Well you miss capability to logically organize your photos using keywords and collections and you lose the ability to filter images using metadata. I have several methods to easily find images I’m looking for by using keywords and metadata. As for editing, yes PS is more powerful, but it’s overkill for 99% of my editing that I can do much faster and easier in LR. And since LR is a parametric editor that only actually applies the changes to the displayed image or on export the original image is never changed. It’s a completely non-destructive workflow. I can create as many virtual copies as I want. I can edit an image several different ways, one original image with different sidecars that make up the virtual image. Really the masking tools have in LR have gotten so good that the only things I do in PS anymore are extending the canvas and cloning out objects.

Just to clarify, for this post and for the OP:

Our OP should confirm the use of LR 'Classic', literally the Classic, desktop, full-function, catalog-based software. The "LRCC" software is now the browser-based software that has been renamed yet again as simply "Lightroom". None of us can control Adobe's determination to make this all confusing. But, we certainly can use the clear and exact product names to avoid still more confusion.

For the comments above, LR (I only mean LR Classic from this point) only does what the human driving the computer instructs the software to do. The software only creates folders as the human instructs. Of course, there are a lot defaults to be managed by the human, sometimes maybe making it seem like the software does its own thing. But no. It only does what the human tells or allows it to do.

Everyone can manage their folders and filenames as best fits their unique needs / approach. But, when you rely on a simple foldering approach and begin to interact with your files only from inside the LR Library (catalog), you begin to realize you don't need to know the filenames nor the folders. There's no reason to do the same work twice, both inside and outside LR. Rather, just add all your descriptive data about individual images and the whole shoot inside LR. Your metadata filters let you find images by shooting date or any number of filtering attributes populated into the catalog when the images were imported. If you want descriptive filenames, consider adding those as-needed when you export the edited results.

LR is a very different way of thinking about your images. Many of us have spent 20 / 30+ years building folder structures and best practices for how to organize and find our files with nothing more capable than a OS 'explorer' search tool. LR is a relational database that captures all relevant data from the image (camera) file as well as all the descriptive data you add via LR keywords and collections. If the data is inside the LR catalog, you can search, sort and / or filter by those image attributes. LR is much much more powerful. You just need to unlearn using the OS tools and work inside and trust LR. Entirely.

I studied computers in university and worked in IT for 26-years. It took me about 6-months to really get familiar with LR. When I relented to so video training, a lot of subtle things finally started to make sense. The software works different than your typical editing software. As an example: it doesn't even have a 'Save' command. Struggling at the start is not unusual. The date-based folder approach (YYYYMMDD) is the best practice, but you don't have to use that approach nor restructure all your existing images. The process of getting your images from the camera to the computer and into LR (import) is covered by the getting-started videos. With that step accomplished, you're ready for the next steps.

Just a small point in personal preferences. I find date-based folders of no value for me. If I do that I MUST use oodles more keywords for my photos. A simple date means nothing to me unless it was yesterday. My top directory name is a simple year 2021, 2022... All the directories below have names such as Grand Canyon 2-22-21. I can usually find something quickly without having to use the search. I love the search and it's power but usually as an exception.

The very first video I watched before I installed LR covered the directory naming possibilities.

Frank, the difference in our responses is mainly the number of images maintained. If you feel you will be doing a lot in photography, then establishing best practices today will really payoff.

In your response you mentioned “all my photos are on an internal drive”. When you start dealing in terabytes of images, you will discover a great need for external drives with additional backup of external drives. Yes, you just point LRC as you so desire to the external drives.

Why “Picture Upload” & “Photos”? Picture Upload, you never cull or edit directly to the camera media (chip). We appear to agree on this point as you mention later you use a culling software. So why a super folder named Picture Upload instead of a dated folder? My dated folder is under Picture Upload. The folder would be “Clovis Water Polo Match 20210315 “. It may take several weeks to get to a project. Personally, I cull using Photo Mechanic in Picture Upload. Once two copies of selected images are backed up, then the folder is deleted in Picture Upload.

The six folder system covers all image categories where as months & years do not, but understand, in one way we are saying the same thing. Your example (assumption we shoot a lot of polo matches), "031521 Clovis water polo match" would be G:\My Lightroom Photos\Travel-Events\Polo Matches\Clovis Water Polo Match 20210315 (note always lead with year). You now have quick and easy visual system. Both of our responses include the ability of LRC to find images in Library key words.

In the end, the system I advocated provides a quick visual system in addition to visual folder dating. Not discussed, but important here, is my Collections mirror my Folders for easy reference as well. Are you less confused now?

Frank, the difference in our responses is mainly the number of images maintained. If you feel you will be doing a lot in photography, then establishing best practices today will really payoff.

In your response you mentioned “all my photos are on an internal drive”. When you start dealing in terabytes of images, you will discover a great need for external drives with additional backup of external drives. Yes, you just point LRC as you so desire to the external drives.

Why “Picture Upload” & “Photos”? Picture Upload, you never cull or edit directly to the camera media (chip). We appear to agree on this point as you mention later you use a culling software. So why a super folder named Picture Upload instead of a dated folder? My dated folder is under Picture Upload. The folder would be “Clovis Water Polo Match 20210315 “. It may take several weeks to get to a project. Personally, I cull using Photo Mechanic in Picture Upload. Once two copies of selected images are backed up, then the folder is deleted in Picture Upload.

The six folder system covers all image categories where as months & years do not, but understand, in one way we are saying the same thing. Your example (assumption we shoot a lot of polo matches), "031521 Clovis water polo match" would be G:\My Lightroom Photos\Travel-Events\Polo Matches\Clovis Water Polo Match 20210315 (note always lead with year). You now have quick and easy visual system. Both of our responses include the ability of LRC to find images in Library key words.

In the end, the system I advocated provides a quick visual system in addition to visual folder dating. Not discussed, but important here, is my Collections mirror my Folders for easy reference as well. Are you less confused now?

My LR collections provide that logical / topical organization where my date-based folder organization gives a simple folder structure. I drop an image into every virtual collection as applicable, something you can't (shouldn't) do at the OS-level folder organization with the files.

Be sure to use both Collections Sets and Collections so you can collapse the views of some larger Collection Sets to regain geography on the visual view of your LR catalog / library.

I don't shoot the same things as you. For me, all photography is "travel" in some sense. I might have a Collection Set for Water Polo. If I specialized in that sport, I might have collections for each match inside a Water Polo collection set. I might have individual year-based collection sets inside the larger Water Polo collection set, then each match as a collection.

If I did different sports but the same schools, I might then also have another Collection Set based on the school and / or level of competition. Assuming I had a keyword for each sport on each image, I could just dump all the sports together into the school's collection. Since it's all virtual, you can organize the collections as make sense to you and mostly drag collections around to redo, if you see something better. Or, create a new / better collection organization and just drop the images into that new (all-virtual) collection structure.

To me, using LR effectively is to give yourself as much search data / filter options as possible. One day I may be thinking about images via keywords, another day via their collections / collection set topical content. Another day I want to see images in a given year, then of a given subject. If you click on the Collection Set, you can also 'see' all the image inside the sub-collections with your filters. So, if I'm looking for "bird" as the feathered-type, I'll search / filter inside the Collection Set of "Zoo" so that I don't also have to ignore the Air Force Thunder"bird" that would come back from a "contains bird" keyword search of the entire catalog.