Unable to search iPhone photos by date

There is a prior thread on this, but it seemed that people were saying it had been taken away with ios 17.0 and yet returned in 17.1, but here I am trying to do this on 18.2 and it’s not working. My only thought is that Apple didn’t want us to go through our photos on the daily in order to delete some of them so that they could get more money from us for iCloud storage, but in fact people are switching to Amazon and Google for photo storage and abandoning Apple over this. Does anybody know why it was taken away, given back, and then taken away again, or if it’s ever going to come back?