It works if you have a massive enterprise sales team and a couple billions for hardware development. See Chromebook.
Granted, there might be other sources (I found this with 1 minute of Google searching), but I doubt they'll paint a much different picture. Chromebooks are just big smartphones and are not a sufficient tool for the tasks which people actually use Desktop computers for.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Its a great device for browsing + youtube/netflix + FB + gdocs. Which is why its so popular in edu because they basically give it away. And its enough for most people.
I used to feel that way until I learned that recent Chromebooks can run Android apps and come with a Linux in a VM, and I am now a very happy Chromebook user. All the software I need is a browser, Emacs, git, SBCL, LaTeX and a few standard Unix tools: I use Chrome and run everything else in the Linux VM.
(And you're right that the file browser is very limited, fortunately I only need it ocasionally to move files between the Linux VM and the ChromeOS file system).
I'm sure they have internal builds which are pure Linux with a compatibility layer to run ChromeOS legacy. There is absolutely no reason a Chromebook can't run that - but then its just another laptop and loses the marketability.
Why can't ChromeOS be a standard Linux distro which runs apps in a flatpak (and validated by Google). That way you can't screw up your machine, you don't really lose any perf, and you have the best of both worlds.
Flatpak sounds worth exploring, although many of the cheaper Chromebook have pretty limited storage space.
Chromebooks are targeted at people who find even Windows too complex.