I'd say that's an exaggeration but it's not great. It would really help if you could default search queries to the 'show results as a list' and quickfilter view, but for some reason that's not an option.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1401708

Sadly, I have the same experience. It's one of the minus points of using Thunderbird, alongside the lack of the feature for shipping my configurations (e.g. filters) across machines.

It is truly horrid. I routinely have to go into the web client to search