Seems that we're talking about different things. I mean the file explorer directly on the device. Like if you are sharing pictures on Facebook, Twitter or even this forum. If you click the add attachment button the device's own file manager open. As you can see in the first row of the first image you can choose different folders to search for pictures or documents you want to share. Every folder is working fine even documents from Dropbox or Google Drive but on some devices you can also see a folder called "My files"(not in the attached image, on Xiaomi Redmi the folder was removed with the Android 11 update). In this folder you can see every files on your phone it doesn't matter if they are stored in pictures, DCIM, screenshots, documents... But if the user pics a file out of the "My files" folder it doesn't work. You can see the difference in the paths from post #3. And there's the problem.
My guess is that is has something to do with the changes they made with sdk 30. Maybe that are only soft links or it has something to do with permissions like it was mentioned in post #4. I don't know. Maybe we need a new library because we are using the same code as in Erel's example(link in the first post). If you have access to a device that have that "My files" folder you can check it out by yourself. Just compile the example. Doesn't work with the "My files" folder. On older Samsung devices, I have an old S7 with Android 7.0, you can find that folder too but there it is still working properly.