Yes but in a tilling setting, a new window (say Thunar), right beside your main app is just a single key-combination away. And it places the window correctly too. So you can drag-drop the file and close the auxiliary window.
Also, since a twm is not tied to a DE, you can pick KDE set of apps for example in i3. Then you'd have a file picker with thumbnails.
That said, I do neither of those things and I suffer from this bug. So you are right in a sense.
But that doesn't really solve the issue with the file picker...