edit @jack.baty:
writing my reply, I had you/general audience in mind as a graphical desktop user. But I went off and browsed your (delightful) blog, and I see you are experienced at the unix command line. Also, your article about the gravitational pull of Emacs is HIGHLY pertinent. I understand better your motivation trying to get Obsidian to work. That it’s not out of inability to use more configurable tools, but precisely to avoid having to configure the tools …
In that light, I thought I should expand a tiny bit more on my setup as it relates to your question. Not an answer, but some more context to consider. In my setup, what works really well is browsing the folder-tree-as-index, using find, fzf, ripgrep and ranger. What’s totally missing is good (wiki) linking and navigation. I’m kind of hobbling along with two cilinders not firing at the moment. I have zk set up and I can follow wiki links about half the time, but they seem to break randomly every few days so it’s not a long-term solution. I used to use vimwiki but I want something with a proper AST so I can extend it at some point in the future. I sorely miss note creation automation. Currently, I create the ID folders, the index.md file, and add the title to the file by hand … 
I haven’t written a script to automate this because I haven’t committed to any one ‘wiki’ app yet, while I evaluate which one seems right for my mental model …
The conundrum seems to be, with Obsidian, you get all this UX free, but then you run into things like you’ve mentioned, where for example you don’t have control over the search results like you would with find (am I right?).
I’ve tried Obsidian three times and ran away screaming three times. I forget why, but since it happened three times I’m not trying again. I think it was the maze of community plugins.
I’ve been learning Emacs in the last two weeks because I finally saw the light regarding org-mode. However, contrary to what Karl Voit says, getting started with Emacs is Simply Not Trivial. I mean, a standard install on Debian gives you a standalone and client/server version which use different init files !!! all well and good, but this is a blocker for an absolute beginner trying to modify the configuration.
So … hopefully not too far off topic. All this to say: I think I understand a bit more of the background of where you’re coming from. And as an expansion of what I said above:
I think there is something important here, regarding simplification. You know what has actually worked for me, breaking the gravitational pull of ‘it should be possible if I tweak things just a bit more’? keeping my index in a paper notebook. Maybe you’re more mature than me, and can live with the shortcomings of a tool like Obsidian and still get on with work … 