Pratically all? I regularly need to select a subset of a very large number of files to do something with. Example: I have a directory, or possibly a tree, with thousands of photos. The photos have the date in ISO 9000 format embedded in their name. Your job is to find all the files from February 2021 and copy them to specified location, and there are 50 of them. Good luck using a visual GUI for that, unless it has the exact selection mechanism you need. Sure, mouse clicking is easier if you're selecting one file from a small set of files to open in a particular program. But I usually find myself frustrated when the only tool I have is a GUI.

Personally, I would use the terminal, too for a throwaway use case like this. But GUIs are very good at that and faster when you do more than the naïve case, they also allow to see intermediate steps.

For your use case, on macOS open Automator.app and add three actions

  1. "ask for finder items" (the source folder)
  2. "filter finder items" (by name)
  3. "copy finder items" (to target folder)

This takes roughly 5 clicks, 10 seconds at most.

Repeatability and configurability is where the GUI action shines. With only one click more you can

- add filtering by size, opening date, modification date, etc. in addition or a combination thereof

- do the same action for multiple source folders and the same target folder

- choose whether you want to replace existing files

- add it as a folder action that runs automatically on modification of the source folder

Arguably much slower on the terminal.

Alternative on macOS, that works on all other major OS with similar shortcuts and a similar feature set, just not repeatable:

  1. Go to source folder (shift-cmd-G)
  2. Filter (cmd-shift-F)
  3. Copy (cmd-A, cmd-C)
  4. Go to target folder (shift-cmd-G)
  5. Paste (cmd-V)

This repeatability, configurability and automation is where GPT falls short, for now.

I believe you, and I'm coming to this conclusion myself, after being a keyboard warrior for years.

Do you have any sources I can read though? I always find it fascinating when our perceptions are so off like this.