Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything.

For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did:

- wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-)

- delete several non-pdf files

- mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum

- move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target.

- mark several pdfs and open with reader app

Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here.

Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.