The problem is these 'solutions' never go away. They are never revisited. So people just keep applying them because 15 years ago they had an issue with them.
Appreciate the utility you pointed out, will happily look into it.
If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)
So regardless of the metrics that support such practice, and casting aside the thousands of people that have routinely seen benefit from the practice, Windows can't be optimized further by the end-user?
As someone who has never encountered a well optimized Microsoft product, and as someone who has routinely had to modify their off-the-shell installs, color me suspicious.
(Agreed, the shady practices and over-zealous disabling of services should stop; but come on -- the end user occasionally understands what they need to do better than the engineer that sold them a generic tool to facilitate generic computer-enabled work.)