Yeah, I used to have a hot corner set up so that I could fling my mouse towards the upper left and then type the first letter or two of the app name, just like in Gnome.

Now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second (possibly my fault - I have 'reduce animations' switched on, but it seems to freeze the screen for the duration of the animation that would previously have played), and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds, and then it might finally respond to my keyboard input... but even then, it fails to find the app maybe 20% of the time. This is on a ~1yo M4 Macbook Pro w/ 36 GB RAM.

So for the past month I've been training myself to alt+tab round to the finder window and navigate to the apps folder from there.

I've never been much of a Macos fan, but this is shockingly poor - less of a papercut, more a wedge of smouldering bamboo shoved under my fingernails.