The change removing Launchpad and fusing with Spotlight has a mildly annoying effect. If I do the five finger gesture on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, and start typing, the first few keystrokes will give me the "you're trying to type where you can't" sound and they won't register into the search box.

Launchpad didn't have this problem. Any text you type while the view is rendering goes into the search bar.

While the OP seems very unhappy and should just switch platforms considering it's a "shitty $1000 phone" to him, I'm just mildly annoyed by these UX regressions to what was otherwise a very good platform.