I had a gap of 5-6 years of not using macOS, now I'm kind of forced as I want my cross-platform native applications to also be available on macOS.

The file manager definitely got a lot worse than it used to be. It doesn't even seem like you can properly move up/down the directory hierarchy anymore with just the keyboard, I think the sequence of holding down "CMD" then spamming "up arrow" no longer takes you to the root, as just one example of workflows they've broken since then.

In comparison though, Windows' file browser is a completely dumpster-fire that sometimes takes 10-20 seconds to load for me, in a relatively barebones Windows 11 installation with 0 network drives. The only stuff that keeps being the same or slightly improving, is the various file managers on Unix/Linux systems, although Gnome's latest iteration took some time before it was as good as the previous versions, for whatever reason.