A decent work-around which I haven’t seen posted is to create a new team that is specifically for archived projects and templates. Then in ‘advanced search > add filter > in teams’ lets you you select the team you want your search results pulled from. As long as you aren’t a search across teams this options functions nicely.
That said, this feature is a fairly standard function in so many data systems (I use quickbooks and this is a checkbox at the bottom of every search). Can’t imagine why this takes 4 years.