I’ve bought FE File Explorer Pro for quickly displaying files managed on my raspberry Pi Samba NAS. Although the files app has become much quicker recently, a directory with 2000 files/directories takes almost 30 seconds to load on my iPad M1, whereas FE File Explorer does this job in less than 2 seconds. So the Apple version is still unusable for me, but FE File Explorer Pro does deliver.
In addition it simply shows more interesting properties of my files, like file extensions. Very handy as my photo camera stores the same photo in two different formats, and using FE it is easy to distinguish between the two. The Apple version just shows what seems to be the same file twice.