How do you group objects together without joining them? In Photoshop you can create a folder and put all the layers under that folder. This makes them easier to manage. How do I do this in Blender?

I'm not looking to do a boolean union or grouping them. I don't understand what the point of ctrl-g group is honestly. It would be nice to have something like the photoshop folder that enables me to manipulate multiple objects at a time, cleans up my hierarchy view, and doesn't join stuff together. Any help? I know this is probably super basic but I can't find it looking online.
there are many ways to do this, if you group objects together you can then add a group instance of that group, this is an empty that controls all the geometry in that group.

Alternatively you could use an empty, parent everything to it and then disable the ability to interact with the objects.

You can also just parent everything to an object of your choice, probably the biggest one of the group, and control everything that way.

It depends what your objective is by grouping.