Since realizing this about 5 years ago, I‘ve actually started optimizing for it. Whenever I hit cmd+s, I make sure to enter a search mindset and make the file name as keyword heavy and stemming friendly as possible. For smaller notes, I just have Sublime Text open with iCloud sync and operate freely with hundreds of tabs. Since then, any thought has never been more than a Spotlight search or a „find in files“ away.

But tags are very valuable when you can filter them, sometimes if you don't remember what to search for but know what it was tagged as you can find it fast. This only is an issue when you have a lot of notes otherwise I agree that search can be almost as good.