I understand what you want. I am not sure that this is what OP wants and if what OP wants was already done. It’s not spelled out as clearly as you did.
To cover your workflow, I believe there should be a way to trigger the page preview popup with the keyboard-only. Either pressing ctrl, or space, or nothing on a selected file.
This should be handled by the page preview plugin. I am gonna open a FR for this (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/trigger-note-preview-with-keyboard-only/43365).
I believe that quick explorer plugin does something similar.