I am curious - is there an analog in the c64 world to this new ProDOS 2.4 release ?
That is to say, have enthusiasts reworked and re-released the built-in c64 firmware or otherwise reworked the OS ?
Many of the Flash-based disk drives for C64 have a DOS shell that includes the CMD disk and file management functions (CMD made hard disks for C64 back in the day), and a bunch of other DOS enhancements built in. So, yeah, kinda; I think it's as close as one could get to being the same. C64 never had a disk-loaded DOS, as the DOS was built into the disk drives themselves (often enhanced by cartridges or a pluggable firmware called JiffyDOS from CMD), so there is not a direct parallel to ProDOS. But, certainly the enhancements from a bunch of places have become widely available to anyone still using the platform with any modern upgrades.
So, yes, you can work with directories and large collections of files, today, that could not be worked with on original hardware (and realistically there wasn't enough room on disks to need good file handling and directory support in the DOS back then). There's also a shell that makes common operations a lot nicer.
Edit: I think it might be worth explaining for folks who weren't around the first time that DOS stands for "disk operating system", and it was exactly that...it made disk drives work, and provided commands for working with files on disks. The OS itself, on both C64 and Apple, was mostly in the firmware, and was mostly just the BASIC programming language and some boot routines to setup the hardware for software to use. There was no protected mode, and no real notion of APIs, as provided by Operating Systems today. Many C64 programs would map over the built-in ROM, and remove what built-in functionality the OS did provide (like BASIC) in order to get more usable RAM. GEOS was perhaps the closest analog to a modern operating system for those old 8 bit systems; in that it had an API and did provide an abstraction of the hardware, to a small degree. Apple loaded more from disk than the C64 did, in the general case; making it more flexible, but also slower to start up.
So yes there was, but most of hit happened 20-30 years ago already.
There were tons of commercial expansions based on this method, such as Simons' BASIC, and the far more ambitious Lightning/White Lightning, which I believe started as a Forth system, and was ported to other platforms too, but also came in a BASIC version. On the C64 - I don't know how different e.g. the Spectrum version was - it allowed multitasking up to 3 or 4 BASIC programs + sprite animation, and offered a lot of extensions for graphics and sound.
Many of these extensions led to equivalent ones written by enthusiasts or published with source in various books. E.g. a number of the books available here [1] have such extensions in them.
Later you got things like GEOS that provided a fully windowed user interface with word processor, spreadsheet, ide's etc. GEOS only really worked decently if you got a hard drive or RAM expansion, though, both of which were rare.
The most common "OS rework" on the C64, though, were freezer cartridges. So named because they had a "freeze" button that would jump into the code on the cartridge without touching anything in main memory, and let you mess around with it, and then restore the original state or dump everything to disk. Which made things like copying games fairly trivial most of the time, but also allowed for things like semi-automated "trainers" (you'd freeze, enable an option, go back into a game, lose a life, freeze again, and the cartridge would scan memory looking for memory locations that were likely locations of life counters, and scan for code that modified them).
There were a bunch of them, with Action Replay and The Final Cartridge being the most popular brands. Action Replay VI being the last one or the C64, but there are Action Replay cartridges and even PC expansion cards for a bunch of other platforms. The Final Cartridge ironically was also released in multiple version, with The Final Cartridge III also including a windowed user interface (which did not end up getting used much, as only very rudimentary software was included and hardly any third party software supported it).
In terms of contemporary stuff, there's the C64 version of Contiki [2] at least, and I'm sure there's more.
[1] http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/books.htm [2] https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Contiki