Voidtool's Everything is one of those things I pretty much can't use a PC without. It's just stunningly useful and performant. MSFT's file search is so slow in comparison it feels almost like a malicious prank.
The "date" column and sort order in Explorer is a "deep state metadata inspection" kind of deal. For ordinary files this makes no difference, it's the same as Date modified, but sorting by date in a folder full of media files generally ends badly and in any case takes a long, long time until Explorer has parsed every last one of them. Explorer also seems to be rather unable to cache the results of this operation.
Pretty sure they said it's because it doesn't support permissions, so you could see anything on your hard drive, that's why they don't support it and do indexing instead
The operating system doesn't need permissions to see anything on your hard drive and it is the operating system that is enforcing the permissions so it can filter the results afterwards. Also, an index can be stale and show files whose permissions have changed that you shouldn't be able to see so the permissions have to be checked on the search results either way.
It and WinDirStat are some of the first things I install on any new instance of a computer. But I may check out this fork and Whiztree for other inspiration.
Disk Inventory X has been a little hit or miss for me. Works OK on my two Macs (Catalina), but can’t index the whole (128GB?) drive on my wife’s MacBook Air (Mojave). Just crashes at some point.