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Not only that but the shortcuts haven't changed as Ctrl + L puts you in the adress bar and Ctrl+K sets you up for a search with the default engine in the adress bar

Except when you run across sites like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web that intercept Ctrl-K for their own internal search tool. At least that one passes a second Ctrl-K on to the browser for focusing the search bar. I've seen others that don't, although I can't bring one to mind right now.

Yep you can. I have mine configured so that it will only search when I use one of the search prefixes. So to search on google I type "g example.com", and this is unambiguous with actually wanting to go to example.com.

This is what I do for work. Most of the pages I go to are not on the open internet. And I usually want to go to a wiki page I’ve been to before or to a book mark. If I actually want to search i use the search box. But for me the url bar is for editing and finding urls.