Right. There were several interesting skins and Finder-esque modifications of Workspace Manager. You may have seen a “Beaker” build of OSX with that. The Kodiak pre-release had the C++ Finder that is still the current Finder with PowerPlant replaced by HIView and some code refactored to use AppKit. No SwiftUI though!

Yeah, a lot of those “blue” features never were adopted or came back. The whole spatial Finder concept was lost.