I ended up with ForkLift after much trial and error. Commander One was nice. Double Commander is also great but not "native" on Mac. Path Finder is super powerful but has a rep for being overcomplicated and also crashy, but I can't personally vouch because it wasn't quite what I was looking for anyway.

Forklift is the one I settled on as well. I had the experience you describe with Path Finder before and finally I gave up.

Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.

The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.

Oof. Those hit close to home for me, too.

Path Finder went to a subscription-only model, no way to outright purchase a license sadly.

The quality of Path Finder went downhill many years ago as well.

also, https://marta.sh/