I think you are in the minority here. For most people, navigating from one folder to another is not "functionality I don't want" in a desktop folder browser, but is the main thing you want to do. I'd much rather have UI that lets me navigate efficiently than that makes it efficient to copy-and-paste arbitrary substrings within a folder path. I do the former almost every time I use the file browser and the latter basically never.

My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.