I am about to give up on Spotlight. I size the taskbar to minimum and permanently hide it, then use Spotlight to launch apps but the config frequently screws up and then fails to find Applications or preferences. Or sometimes takes 10+ seconds to find something. It's done this for me across multiple MacBooks, multiple versions of macOS, etc. All I want from Spotlight is instant finding of apps/utilities and systems prefs. I've tried so many solutions suggested across the internet (rebuilding refs, restarting indexing, etc) and nothing has consistently worked.