It's not an oversight in REST, it's one of the ways of trying to faithfully implement REST over HTTP, which has a gaping hole in the standard set of methods that messes with that use case. While HTTP (specifically 1.1) is an implementation of REST principles, that use case wasn't front-and-center at the time (PATCH is also a recent fix to another hole.)

There have been proposed standardized fixes such as generalizing the HTTP SEARCH method that first appeared in WebDAV[0], but none have yet gone far.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-snell-search-method-01