Search feels to me like a good compromise between memorizing terminal commands (including the correct set of parameters to do what you want) and navigating through a UI to find what you're looking for.
Search is fine as a one-off thing, but if you repeatedly have to use search to find some common setting, that's a clear UX fail.
To be fair, it's hard to say whether the Settings app is more broken in Windows or macOS these days. I think I'd have to give the crown to macOS here on account of search itself being more broken.
Why is it a UI fail? Honestly search as the default way of going to settings is my favorite development in modern OS design, I no longer need to memorize 3-6 deep menu trees to find a trivial setting.
For example:
I prefer keeping my hands on the keyboard, and typing cmd+space followed by mouse is so much faster than finding the right pixels to click through in menu trees when I want to adjust my mouse sensitivity.
I didn't say that search itself is a UX fail. It's not; it's great!
The UI fail is if search is required to find the setting every time you need it, because categorization and/or navigation is broken otherwise.
As to keeping your hands on the keyboard, that's an argument for having proper keyboard support in any UI, complete with hotkeys and shortcuts. The big difference between these and search is that the former is (if properly done), consistent and predictable. So e.g. when the app adds new things in the future, your existing key sequences will still do the same thing they did before.
To take your specific examples, if I do Cmd+Space, "mouse", Enter on my system, it will bring up LinearMouse, not system mouse settings.
Disagree with this. I use the search for everything. It’s just so much quicker than even a well designed UI.
On my iphone, I have one page of apps, everything else in the app drawer, and use the search all the time. It often gets what I want in one or two chars.
