This has always seemed to me to be a species of "file oriented" working, and I prefer apps that run in a file oriented way. For instance, a graphical file manager that shows a folder in a window, and you click to get open an item in the folder you so always get a new window - even if it happens that the item in folder is just another folder that is opened by the graphical file manager. Or office apps which always open each document in a new window, and when I close the current document, the only thing I notice is that the current document is closed - it doesn't try to focus some other window from the same app.
But Mac OS has always seemed an almost perfectly application-based interface with its fully application-based dock and it's application-based global menu (close a window for a file that was loaded by Cool App, and Cool App's menu still shows). I think it's Finder is a bit confused: it used to be mostly file based, at some point in the OS X years it got more and more application based but perhaps it's swung back - it's been a few years since I've bothered trying Mac OS. It had some of the most appalling virtual desktop support when I last used it, that made me think "the people who have implemented this only work in an application-based way". I can only imagine that's got better. But it seems that Mac OS is always: application-based workflow is prioritised, file-based workflow is secondary.
I have found that Linux can[1] excel in this workflow, Windows is ambivalent to all workflows, supporting all of them badly because it supports none at all, and Mac OS prefers you to think "what tool am I using", not "what task am I doing".
Is my experience entirely unique?
[1] i.e. it depends on what particular tooling you're using - it's possible a default setup is appalling.
That said, I do most of my heavy lifting on the Mac, and all primary dev on a Mac. Doing the equivalent tasks is a chore in Windows. I used to be all-Windows, but once I understood that MacOS is file-oriented and not program-oriented, it helped a lot.