Someone has realized the search results are insane, as there's at least one obvious fix buried in settings:

I open Finder, click on Applications, search "Google Chrome". Top results? MarketingAnalytics.yaml, aria-proptypes.md, and so on, from some project I cloned off of Github into my home directory at some point. I guess the file contents include "Google Chrome"?

Clearly insane, but under the "Advanced" finder settings, it's easy to find "Search the Current Folder". Suddenly, you get the result you'd expect.