This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.
I’d like to see “trending” removed entirely from Mastodon. I don’t give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I’ve got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.
The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It’s badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.
This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.