You should be able to pull down on any page of the home screen to bring up the app search screen, rather than having to swipe all the way to the left.

You can now also long press the wifi icon (twice) from the control centre in iOS 13 to quickly switch wifi networks without going into the settings app, you can also do the same with the bluetooth icon.

A lot of this stuff is really hard to just discover though if you're not already aware it exists to begin with.