Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

All too often, I give up trying to tap my way through Settings and instead pull down to reveal the Search field, before remembering that searches in Settings often fail.

And:

It’s worse even than the System Preferences app in macOS, which at least shows all preference panes without the need to scroll. In fact, System Preferences points to the simple way Apple could rearrange the Settings app to make it easier to navigate.

Did you know that when System Preferences is the frontmost app on the Mac, you can go to the menu bar and choose View > Organize Alphabetically? And it does!

This is a growing pains problem. An interface approach that works well when something is small falls apart when the set of elements being organized grows too big. At some point, a second (and even third) layer of organization is required. And it does not help when all the various organizational methods are wildly inconsistent.

Adam suggests offering a second level “view by” scheme that supports an alphabetical sort of settings. I think this is a step in the right direction, but I’d take this one step further.

I’d suggest that Apple take a look at every single sorting and searching problem in macOS and iOS and consider re-rolling all of them to make them consistent. The end result would have the user learn one basic approach and instantly translate that knowledge throughout the ecosystem.

As is, it is all a bit bewildering.