I haven’t had a single issue with this. I’m guessing many people had this issue immediately after upgrading while Spotlight was still re-indexing and are just running with it since it’s cool to hate Tahoe right now.

No, if this happened to people 2-3 times right after upgrading this wouldn't be something they bring up because the indexing doesn't take months. It's broken. Spotlight used to work almost perfectly since it was introduced and it's been lagging and somewhat defunct since Tahoe.

My search never recovered but I just didn't care to fix it, too many things to fix and my IDE has its own spotlight. I'm normally a vanilla-don't-touch-settings guy.

When I try to launch system settings through spotlight, it launches system info. They have the same prefix, but that's no excuse. Never happened since Tiger or so.