I understand the frustration and I'm with you that Finder is atrocious. My head-cannon about this is that for consistency within macos, all actions must be cmd

I understand the frustration and I'm with you that Finder is atrocious. My head-cannon about this is that for consistency within macos, all actions must be cmd+something, so is cmd+O for opening a file. In the terminal you can also use the "open" command which opens the file or the directory (I use "open ." a lot, I find faster navigating in the shell that in the finder).