EXACTLY! It’s so annoying and I remember you could disable it until you couldn’t for whatever stupid reason. Now I just leave the apps that I don’t use more than once every two weeks in there and search for them. Imagine actually wading through those folders looking for an app and not calling yourself a lunatic when Spotlight is so much faster.

I use it semi regularly because I’ve limited myself to just two pages of Home Screen, and spatially, it is faster to launch a couple of apps that I use semi regularly, but didn’t make it to the Home Screen. It is faster than Spotlight search for me because it is super fast to short swipe twice and tap the icon, instead of longer pulling down spotlight, orient the keyboard and wait for search results to populate. I understand this is not for everyone as most people I know have more than two screens of icons, and would take more time to get to the drawer, but at least it works for me.

I think another thing that might make it faster is if Focus based Home Screen is used, the amount of pages could be drastically reduced in various customized focus modes… but I’ve never gotten into that and frankly I’m inclined to think that’s a super power user mode very few outside of Apple dives into.

Edit: also spotlight search is slower when you’d need to change keyboard languages to search for a non-default language app, especially if the other language is slower/less familiar to input (Chinese and Japanese comes to mind for me).