I suspect there is no decent "minimal" API. Once you get to tens of millions of objects in a given prefix, you need server side filtering logic. And to make it worse, you need multiple ways to do that.

For example, did you know that date filtering in S3 is based on string prefix matching against an ISO8601/RFC3339 style string representation? Want all objects created between 2024-01-01 and 2024-06-30? You'll need to construct six YYYY-MM prefixes (one per month) for datetime and add them as filter array elements.

As a result the service abbreviation is also incorrect these days. Originally the first S stood for "Simple". With all the additions they've had to bolt on, S2 would be far more appropriate a name.