Not to shove Emacs into a Vim thread but Emacs file browsing is actually pleasurable. You can have a tree if you want (neotree) but C-x C-f with Ivy fuzzy search makes navigating really easy. It's one of the things I wish Vim had for a long time and one of the things that eventually drew me away from Vim to Emacs.

Anyway, to add to your point there are also cases where highlighting a large chunk of code is often easier with mouse based nav.