Search is notoriously difficult to get right, but we agree that there’s definitely room for improvement.
I’ve struggled to turn up that same topic from time to time, so maybe we can improve our own keywording a little within it. Including the documentation category or the how-to tag improves the results dramatically (I agree that it shouldn’t be necessary!)
We’re also experimenting with a new search plugin that may help improve search using Typesense (hopefully we’ll have something to test on Meta within the next few weeks) — searching “settings in themes” using our internal demo returns that topic as the 4th result, so that seems a little promising.