Explorer is a much better tool than Finder. Couldn't agree more.
I remember outstanding file managers way back in the MS-DOS days. Sidekick, QuickDOS, and Norton Commander were great.
My take is that expert users use the terminal while regular users don’t like to do much with files. So there’s no push for a powerful graphical file manager.
SSDs make it tolerable… not by fixing it but by being fast enough to hide it. Back in the spinning disc days you could tell a windows machine by how much kerchunking the drive was doing.
MacOS (the OS) is much better than Windows.
But MacOS (the user interface) is worse than Windows (or even Linux).