It’s hard not to overstate how much of a big deal it is that Mastodon is adopting this kind of search functionality. Mastodon still makes up a vast portion of the Fediverse.
While other platforms have supported this for way longer, having buy-in by the biggest player in the space will probably have a huge effect on standard expectations moving forward.
Did they, though? A bunch of other Fediverse platforms have supported this for literally years, to the point that Mastodon was the butt of jokes for breaking basic search functionality.
Having standard search that just works is a huge deal, and helps solve against the decentralized content discovery problem.
Not to mention, it’s opt-in by default.