I've always liked the Windows Explorer Treeview+Listview style file managers (XYplorer is vey good), but for heavy workloads, nothing beats Total Commander!
Imho tree-view or 'single pane' style file managers are okay if you're just browsing. Open a file here or there, move something to elsewhere in the directory tree, etc.
For more serious work I always gravitate towards 2-pane file managers like TC (#1 favourite on Windows, which for me is back in the stone age).
Fro me, it's things like comparing directories, filename search-and-replace/multi-rename, copying/syncing (locally or over ftp) with editable queues, etc.
Shameless self promotion of my own AI experiments.
Around 110000 files checked out related to the OEIS database. The project is open source here:
https://loda-lang.org/
I'm experimenting training a vision transformer with ARC tasks. There are 800 tasks, and each task augmented yields around 10000 files. However my ViT code cannot solve any ARC tasks, but my non-ViT code solves 6 ARC tasks.
https://lab42.global/arcathon/leaderboard/
For more serious work I always gravitate towards 2-pane file managers like TC (#1 favourite on Windows, which for me is back in the stone age).