Yup. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypotheses was more referring to how the feature might have made sense in the earlier days when Google

Yup. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypotheses was more referring to how the feature might have made sense in the earlier days when Google respects all the keywords in our search queries. As Google evolved, it became impossible to drill into those results, but there's no upside for any product manager to change/remove it.