I love how android solves such problems. Instead of making the decision of whether a file manager must somehow be able to handle file picking, every application is allowed to choose whether it can do file picking. For a file manager it would probably be trivial, but the wonderful thing about this design is that it is very flexible
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/1bdb78a215f5e119...
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme