At the same time the mobile operating systems are vulnerable to vendor lock-in due to the absence of this functionality. It is clearly a worse problem that a user can't give their backup system access to the photos stored by other applications (often social media), or for instance reliably capture media streams to use in for instance a remixing application. Bringing custom clients when the software originally used to create the interesting files starts acting against the users by introducing subscriptions or being abandoned is another example of the user dictating what software accesses what files is critical to secure the users operations. Consumers need security against commercial interests infinitely much more than commercial interests need protections against consumers, and it would be unethical to enable commerce at the expense of individuals like the mobile operating systems do.

There is a lot of middle ground between “every app can do anything as the user” and “no shared file system, no user access to app ‘owned’ files”.

Any time big corp implements strong sandboxing they'll inevitably put the user inside of the sandbox.

That's a valid concern, but not an argument against sandboxing, in my opinion.