That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.

But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.