it's been a while since you used macos? apple has completely stopped giving a shit, extremely basic functionality like spotlight and settings search have been completely broken for years now...
I use spotlight constantly for everything, but I admit I don't use the search feature in settings all that often.
I see a lot of "ugh, Tahoe is just the iOS-ification of macOS" on HN, which, on the surface, I get -- the visual changes by and large make things worse, and ironically I think they're actually not as good as the changes on iOS. But the Mac got stuff that the iPad didn't, and there's still a lot you can't do on the iPad that you can on the Mac. I don't think the two are merging any time soon, even if they're becoming more visually similar. (Actually, I don't think the two will ever merge, strictly speaking, but that's another post.)
like, you learn to work around this, mostly by just using raycast, but it's just unacceptable that they've spent BILLIONS on useless ai shit, while stuff THAT HAS WORKED CORRECTLY ALREADY IN THE PAST gets broken and goes unfixed for literal years
I usually google where a particular setting is now since I don't use the exact same words and the settings search is very literal.