Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path.

It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text.

I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :)

I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.

Drag n drop being something you can actually use and that usually does the thing you'd expect, rather than something you train yourself never to do outside things like moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it usually breaks things, is one of the things that makes it hard to switch away from macOS once you're used to it. Last time I tried KDE a couple years ago I crashed an app in the first five minutes by trying to drag n drop, and was like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't used to ever try to drag and drop things".

And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.

One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits.

The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state.

https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg

here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.

Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.