Firefox does have a setting to add the search bar back if that’s your jam, you can turn off address bar search suggestions in the settings too.
If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config
Not only that but the shortcuts haven't changed as Ctrl + L puts you in the adress bar and Ctrl+K sets you up for a search with the default engine in the adress bar
Except when you run across sites like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web that intercept Ctrl-K for their own internal search tool. At least that one passes a second Ctrl-K on to the browser for focusing the search bar. I've seen others that don't, although I can't bring one to mind right now.
Yep you can. I have mine configured so that it will only search when I use one of the search prefixes. So to search on google I type "g example.com", and this is unambiguous with actually wanting to go to example.com.
This is what I do for work. Most of the pages I go to are not on the open internet. And I usually want to go to a wiki page I’ve been to before or to a book mark.
If I actually want to search i use the search box. But for me the url bar is for editing and finding urls.
If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config