Google wants you to handle all your storage needs through Drive and Google Photos, where they are in control, can scrape more data, train models on your photos, and push you onto paid storage plans.

I can’t really see the benefit to Google in having an excellent local file manager with wide archive-file support. It doesn’t profit them in any way that I can think of.

Thankfully the workaround isn’t too bad, just installing an alternative file manager.