Using search for keyboard navigation of remote filesystems is painfully slow
With the loss of type-ahead navigation, my understanding is that keyboard navigation is meant to be served by the search-cancel flow. This is quite painful in remote directories (or, at least, my SMB share). The search blocks input until the entire remote directory is re-scanned (even non-recursively). This prevents quick keyboard navigation.
For example, trying to navigate to files starting with "dark", I'll type the full word followed by Esc, but the nautilus window will show the window blocked while searching 'da' as it re-scans the full remote directory. Once it unblocks, it registers the search cancel without results, and returns to the top of the remote directory after refreshing the directory again -- it does not select a proper result (or any result, for that matter) this way.
In order for the search to work for keyboard navigation here, i have to type the word, wait for the full search scan to complete and for the result to show as highlighted, hit Esc, and wait again for the directory to refresh. This is a painfully slow process compared to how type-ahead works on a remote directory.