There isn’t really a lot of alternatives to the "desktop", since it basically just means arranging stuff within a rectangle, and what else would you do on a rectangular screen? The only alternatives are having everything fullscreen, like TUIs, or else tiling windows, so that you never see the actual desktop. Similar for folders. You need a way to visually represent groupings of stuff, and there isn’t a lot of choice besides lists/menus or a two-dimensional layout of proxy items (usually labelled icons).

I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.