Not OP, but I get their frustration. File browsing is not very amenable to keyboard based navigation IMO. I'm currently using fdfind through telescope.nvim as well as another neovim plugin for this, but I can easily see why someone would want to use a terminal based text editor, with a mouse based file navigation tool.
Not to shove Emacs into a Vim thread but Emacs file browsing is actually pleasurable. You can have a tree if you want (neotree) but C-x C-f with Ivy fuzzy search makes navigating really easy. It's one of the things I wish Vim had for a long time and one of the things that eventually drew me away from Vim to Emacs.
Anyway, to add to your point there are also cases where highlighting a large chunk of code is often easier with mouse based nav.
