You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device

The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.

The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.

I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.

Then again, rose colored glasses and all.

Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.

I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).

reMarkable does Online Handwriting Recognition with MyScript running in the cloud, not on the tablet https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2