The situation is insane. The only way to navigate messages is “keep scrolling up”, no way to filter searches beyond a simple keyword search, there’s no read-only view so you lose your scroll position if you get a message, etc etc etc.

The core interactions are mostly very well done, when you use a different messaging app you tend to see all the touch edges they sanded down. But it is just incredibly lacking in features for such an important part of their ecosystem.