It drives me crazy that the interface to create/link entities is different depending on if it’s a “to one” or “to many” relation.
Maybe there’s a technical reason, but otherwise there’s no reason to not have the same filtering/sorting options for any relationship fields.
On this page about relation/context filters, it says:
The filters also do not apply when you link an Entity via a search popup:
This popup shows recent items by default instead.
As usual, if this doesn’t fit your workflow, please let us know via Intercom.
So please consider this my request to have them treated the same and have the filter/sort options added for “to many” relationship fields.