Since that feature actually was removed, it is unlikely that it will return. Or rather it was modified to include projects of users as the search results, if you search for profile/display names.
Itch is project centric. Not user centric. Searching (and finding) a user that has published no projects makes little to no sense at all on Itch. You cannot interact with a user directly. There are no private messages.
I do not know.
But they improved name search, actually. Previously you could only find exact profile names. So if you were to have a profile named bobbywojak and changed your display name to Bojak the Destroyer, you could not find bobbywojak with the display name.
Search is a bit literal and not very forgiving for typos and missing words. This was enhanded too, but is far from googles typo resilience. It is also a title search, not a description/content search. This is often not apparant for new users.
And the worst is searching for generic titles with clutter (words that are not part of the title, but were put in the title)
