The project heavily relies on lodash for it's implementation actually, so you can of course do it straight with lodash, however the benefit is that you don't ha

The project heavily relies on lodash for it's implementation actually, so you can of course do it straight with lodash, however the benefit is that you don't have to write any code to produce complex searches (with multiple nested levels of $or and $and), which would require a lot of conditionals if done straight with JavaScript. Another benefit (which was the reason behind the implementation), is that we can stringify the search object to easily persist and share it, which would not be that easy with plain code.