Understood. Let’s stipulate that all these facts are accurate.
But I’d postulate that by making search opt-in, search is pretty useless. It has hurt discoverability, and to compensate, put awkward burdens on individual users who stuff their toots with character-count-wasting hashtags in an effort to boost discoverability.
And I’d argue the Network Effect, so crucial to helping social neworks grow and thrive, has been weakened on Mastodon in large part by the search policy.