Spotlight on macOS most definitely searches files, much of the system is in fact built on file system metadata attributes. (It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo, who also architected BeOS's file system.)
Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.
This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.