It could be that everyone just delegates to elastic search or similar which I think might be incapable of exact string searching (a trade off to get better fuzz

It could be that everyone just delegates to elastic search or similar which I think might be incapable of exact string searching (a trade off to get better fuzzy searching and speed). Tuning ES is probably possible but takes commitment and is complicated I suspect most don’t bother! I used it in one side project and a lot of tuning is needed for your use case.