I never used pc clones when I was a kid. It was an Amiga for me, and in my world Directory Opus was king. It still is on my windows pcs these days. Great software and still actively developed.
Come to think of it, I no longer recall what Windows Explorer actually looks like.
Yes, Directory Opus is outstanding. I'm an Emacs fanboy to an intense degree, but I've never bothered to learn Dired. Directory Opus, although mouse-driven, is simply too powerful.
For bulk-renaming, I love ranger's :bulkrename command, which I think calls out to an external program, vidir or something. It opens the list of files in vim where it becomes very fast to do edits to them. Easy copy/paste, flipping between upper and lowercase, etc. You can do the same edits on multiple lines using visual mode. It all works how you'd expect if you know vim.
Taught me BASIC 40 years ago as a 10 year old and started the rest of my career.