I used single click in Windows from when it first became available .. 98SE maybe? .. I really don't see the point of "click to select" on a Desktop as there is no "File" menu to actually
do anything with the highlighted item.

Click it again and it wants you to rename it. Stoopid. Also, it is totally non-intuitive and requires a fairly specific repetition rate, which is quite hard to achieve once you've been using SC for years. It's not a natural action. It also shortens the useful lifetime of your mouse .. or worse, the built-in trackpad buttons, for no good reason ...
Even in a File Manager, such as Dolphin, Nemo, Caja & Thunar, SC is much more practical, as by far the most common desired action is to open something, rather than rename or do anything else with it. If one wants to perform a different action, that is what the other mouse button(s) is/are for.
One of my mates HATES single-click. I really can not understand why. It defeats the purpose of having a "shortcut" (link). What makes this worse is that it isn't even consistent, in Windows OR Linux. Some elements require a clicklick to launch whereas other links to the same programs require one click, by default, on all but KDE (up to the latest Neon, that is, IIRC). Even in KDE, some actions still require a doubleclick.
You can use the mouse to drag a selection rectangle across the items you wish to select .. and in KDE's excellent Dolphin file manager, you can click the + (it toggles - & + on each click), which appears in the corner of an icon when you hover over it. That way, you can individually select multiple items.

In non-KDE DEs you can hold CTRL to select multiple items or SHIFT to select a continuous section of the file listing.
On Touchscreens, where there is a definite advantage to double tap, in order to prevent accidental launches, this hasn't been implemented. But the default for the mouse is still clicklick to get anything done, at least in Windows*. Should be the other way round.
*
I haven't used Windows for quite a while so this may have changed.