I agree with you, but just in case you don't know, Cmd + Up goes up the hierarchy, Cmd + Down descends into the highlighted directory. I rarely use the mouse in Finder. List view, arrow keys and these two shortcuts are just faster.

Thank you. I think I used to use that a lot but didn’t use macOS for a period of a few years and lost the muscle memory.

I feel like if you’re going to use the keyboard, though,

cd ..

is just as fast.

Yeah keyboard is the way to go. My absolute favourite completely hidden shortcut in Finder is, because all hotkeys are modifier keys, you can quickly type a few unique characters of the dir/file name and it’ll jump right to it

Yes! That’s quite nice. I quite like the fact that you can rename files by hitting enter and just typing. And space toggles a very quick preview that depends on file type.

Finder’s not all bad!

The enter shortcut really threw me at first. Because everyone else uses enter to mean open the file. It just seems like an odd choice, since people open files far more often than they rename them.

quicklook is great. (I think something like it is built into nautilus now) Hitting enter to rename a file threw me so hard initially that I muscle memorised the f2 shortcut for other systems.

You can enable the "Show Path Bar" option (under the "View" menu), which helps, but still not quite what you want. I also find it weird that the path bar is at the bottom of the window.

After many years of struggling I learned recently “cmd + up arrow” will bring you to the parent folder.

Of course that combo is close to your mousing hand. Not ideal but better than filing around with that drop down and cursing.

Right-click the folder name in Finder’s title bar, shows and allows jumping to parent folders.