Thanks for this article. As a long-time, paid user of FreeCommander on Windows, I was desperate to find something similar to it when I moved to Mac in 2020. Path Finder is the closest I was able to find, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing it lacks (as far as I can see) is Finder's ability to drag and drop files to iPhone.

Finder itself is almost identical to every standard Linux file manager I've ever seen, and not so different from the File Explorer in Windows: a limp, single-pane interface that's hard to manage and yet is too tightly-integrated into the default window manager to actually be replaced with something better.