The sync feature is great, though there are many oddities with search sort order, unnecessary terminal cleanups, odd timeouts, etc. In some aspects it's a big upgrade from fzf, in some aspects it's a downgrade.
The sort order is strange, I agree. I forked Atuin awhile back with the goal of adding more strategies, but it was tougher than I expected. IIRC, changing search order involves updating both the DB queries and how the application code interacts with them.
The search defaults are pretty bad, but I'm happy with "fuzzy" mode.
I'm using it, but it's still much less natural than what I had with fzf.