Spotlight won't search within folders

I'm reposting this question. I originally posted last December, and got a lot of suggestions for things to try, but none of the suggestions solved the problem. At that time I was having several other problems with my Mac (most notably, frequent kernel panics), and I thought that maybe there was some unique bug deep inside my Mac, so I finally broke down and bought a brand new M1 MacBook Pro. (That was painful, because the previous Mac was less than 2 years old.)

So now I have a new MBP, and it's running great - except that Spotlight still won't search within folders.

If I do a Spotlight search at the top level ("This Mac"), Spotlight returns results instantly. (So, yes, Spotlight has indexed the drive.)

But if I navigate to a folder in a Finder window and enter a term in the search field in the window, Spotlight returns nothing. When a search is active in a finder window, an option appears to search "This Mac". If I click on "This Mac", search results appear immediately.

This problem is not related to Spotlight privacy settings. Spotlight is set to index my entire internal SSD. The only items excluded from Spotlight are external drives that I use for back-up and storing my music.

Per a recommendation from my original post, I downloaded an app called Find Any File (FAF). Using FAF, I can search within a folder and search results will appear immediately. If I try to repeat the same search using Spotlight (or, more specifically, Cmd-F) in a finder window, Spotlight will not return any search results.

When I first posted this, a lot of people chimed in saying they have the same problem, so this isn't unique to my Mac.

Really hoping that someone can come up with a solution to this problem this time around. I suppose I could start using FAF, but it's not nearly as convenient as just typing Cmd-F when I have a window open in finder and searching that way.