My impression is similar and that's why I asked the question. Another thing that is not clear to me: Is there query directly fed into e.g. SBERT or should I ask an LLM to transform the query into something more suitable, like turning the question into a proposition?

>Another thing that is not clear to me: Is there query directly fed into e.g. SBERT or should I ask an LLM to transform the query into something more suitable, like turning the question into a proposition?

This not how 99% of embedding models work(though you can train for specific tasks) but as it turns out such a thing is possible and is beneficial.

Instruct tuned embedding model here - https://instructor-embedding.github.io/

This kind of thing is going to seem so obvious in hindsight in six months once all the sota methods start converge upon similar improvements lol. It’s still so early, I keep telling myself.