I honestly found them very easy to ignore and just watched the gameplay. I didn’t even register them until you mentioned them.

I don’t understand what your issue with it is.

I really wish Apple would put the search box convention back at the top of the screen. It's hard enough as it is, I don't want to keep spending so much time just trying to figure out where the search box is.

This completely breaks any semblance of a unified experience. Some tiny number of web pages may be able to accommodate this, but most of them can't, and even more of them won't. This isn't just a shifting of conventions, it's a transition that many things will be left behind in.

I'm picking on imdb a bit here, but this is only an obvious example of this widespread problem. In which of these is it easiest to find the search box?

Nah man, you can order a slab if you want