Searching for "safari" does not show the Safari application in any of the visible results. I'm about 95% sure that, in previous versions, if any applications were an exact match for your search term, those would show up first.
When I was on windows, I used Autohotkey to create and override a lot of shortcuts so I could for example, just do Win+v and it would open Vivaldi, if there wasn't a vivaldi.exe process running. If there was a process running, it would bring any window with "- Vivaldi" title to the foreground and holding the Win and pressing v again would loop through open Vivaldi windows. It was a good workflow for me.
Haven't really tried to replicate it on KDE and does anyone know if that's even possible?