free desktop "making progress" on something Windows XP had no problems with from the get go is frankly embarrassing and probably a sign of, at best, destructively entitled maintainers, and at worst, controlled opposition.
I think it's just bad design and tech debt, and maybe leadership having trouble getting someone to take the risk to make the change.
Looks like it's getting fixed, though.
GTK4 is getting them.
It's not GTK4, it's nautilus
The recent GTK4 release added them to the file picker.