But as someone who has grown up with computers, it's quite aggravating to not be able to "pu<enter>src<enter>mod<enter>vi<enter>in"

Sure, it's more intuitive to do that in the terminal, but sometimes being able to quickly drill down and THEN be able to inspect the folder visually, is very helpful.

... to access public/src/modules/views/index.js

The user experiences are very different between the two features and trying to conflate them is a mistake in my opinion. since I use typehead to navigate the file manager quickly without touching the mouse, replacing it with a very slow recursive search made nautilus unusable to me. Even if the search was very fast, though, it would still be a good search but a bad navigation tool.

Luckily there are alternatives and Nemo is a great file manager.

And it is! The files in the current folder _always_ sort to the top. The only real loss between this and the previous behaviour is that the view changes slightly, so the other (not matching) files disappear. But even the selection sticks, so if you hit Escape you can see the matching file in context.