Microsoft's design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.

Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it's just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.

I believe they will never allow users to delete entire chats like that because it will cause mass panic for users and managers, particularly. You already have users doing dumb shit like deleting files accidentally. And more than that, you’ll have managers getting upset that users may be doing it on purpose like “omg I never saw that message! 😱 “

Deleting your own stuff is easy and okayed because it’s not an easy process and it involves multiple steps.

with absolutely no way to organize it, categorize it, order it, or in any way manage it other than deleting history

But you can pin any chat and you can reorder any pinned chat (and maybe even non-pinned ones - I haven't checked).

That's my primary gripe too. I could theoretically work around it if the chat search worked. I'll try searching for a specific word to see who said it to me and when, but if it was more than a couple days ago I'm out of luck. Later I'll remember who said it, eventually find them in the sidebar, scroll up 40 pages in the chat, and find the exact word Teams claimed it's never heard of.

I know someone working there. I was in a few group calls he organised using teams where I used an anonymous login. Then Microsoft forced you to make an account to use it, so I declined after that.

It literally keeps every single conversation you've ever had in a big long list on the left,

Not all of them, actually. I regularly have to use the search function to find chats/groups I haven't used in a bit. The most organization you can do is the dozen pinned threads they let you have.