Re: Update filename history after several actions

[Richard M. Stallman]

    Recentf is quite an old package, and it seems its users are happy with
    the way it records recently opened files.  Perhaps this means there
    are not many places where find-file-noselect is used for internal file
    processing (i.e. not intended for the users to know).

There are lots of them!  Just search the Lisp sources
for find-file-noselect.  There are about 230 occurrences,
and I think around 200 of them do something like this.
Custom does it, bookmark.el does it, desktop.el does it,
to list but a few.

How does recentf interact with those packages?

                                                           In those places
    where such processing is required, a more preferable way is to insert
    the contents of a file into a temporary buffer.

That is definitely true.  However, there are a lot of places to
change--and it could be a difficult change, in places that alter the
file and want to be careful not to lose it (places that use
file-precious-flag).  So I don't think that is a possible solution
in the short term.