How to transfer files from a Smartphone easily

[j7n]

I got my first contemporary smartphone. A Showme Redmi 14C running HyperOS 2  (Android 15). I am not impressed by how many hoops I have to jump through to connect it to the computer. When first connected, it showed in the Windows 2008 R2 device manager as "Redmi 14" of course without a driver. After I enabled developer mode by tapping on the version number and enabled file transfer in developer options, it now shows in the device manager as "MTP", which I guess stands for Media Transfer Protocol. The smartphone is still patially "locked" whatever that means and I am not allowed to access it fully.

In my previous phone running Android Gingerbread I had to pull down the top bar to enable USB Mass Storage. It was a sort of hidden feature that I had to Google for. It then appears as a USB stick without any driver needed. But not so much with the new smartphone.

Can I use this MTP protocol without installing bloated software? On Windows Server 2008 R2. (Not any current sofware that requires Windows 10)

What other easy methods for transferring files are there?