Funny, that's one of the things I dislike the most about macos. I think the keyboard shortcuts there are generally noticeably less comfortable than windows and Linux. It's not even just shortcuts, regular keybindings are also worse on macos IMO. I will never understand why the enter key still renames a file/directory instead of opening it.
It's because the gui is designed to be navigated with the mouse. The idea that someone would use the mouse to select a file then use the enter key just didn't cross anyone's mind. If someone is using the keyboard in a GUI navigation, it's probably for text entry- such as search, or renaming a file.