I’m using iPadOS 17 and it is vastly better than 16, so once it comes out you should give it a shot. I can absolutely understand being unhappy with it before. What makes 17 so much better is that you have the freedom to move windows around where you want, but it also does a great job of managing focus and organizing them. I’ve used full-screen exclusively on Mac since Lion, but now I’m all Stage Manager all the way.

I do agree about file management, but I don’t really work with files at all on my device anyway - code is in the dev box I SSH in to, and everything else is in Google Drive.

For reference, 80-90% of my work is slack/gmail/gdocs/zoom. The rest is development work done using a PWA for VSCode, code-server on my dev box and Blink Shell for SSH (I would prefer Termius but I can’t have SSH port forwarding done automatically). This works quite smoothly and gives me access to pretty much everything I need.