Recents folder does not show recent files in Mojave.

After being forced to upgrade to Mojave (because I was forced to update iTunes to back up my phone) I have spent two days trying to figure out the "Recents" folder. It does not work.

"All My Files", the sorting mechanism I used a hundred times a day, is gone, replaced with this useless non-functional canned search.

In addition, it's now impossible to sort different Finder sidebar folders by different criteria, unless the "view" is also different. For example, I cannot sort Desktop by Date and Documents by Name, unless I use column view for all folders I want sorted by name and list view for the folders I want sorted by date. Whatever sort criteria I choose for one is also applied to the other, no matter how many times I set the criteria in "Show view options". So, view options is also broken.

I downloaded two .pdfs yesterday, and they did not show up in Recents. Someone suggested that you have to find the files, open them, then close them again before they show up in Recents. I tried that and one now shows up, but the other does not. This is insane.

Does anyone have a fix for this? I feel blind not having a place to look at files I've recently been working on. We cannot be expected to remember the names of every file we are looking for. We need the dates.