You mean Watson was never blocked.

Sherlock was the Apple tool that (in version 3) took heavy inspiration from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson.

Allegedly etc etc.

Seems quite meta that the term for this was taken from Apple's software. Sherlocked effectively means replaced and forgotten.

Alfred seems live fine alongside spotlight too.

Alfred has a lot more features. For example I constantly use the clipboard manager in Alfred and as far as I know, Spotlight has no such functionality.

Of course, Alfred was always designed to work alongside Spotlight since all the actual indexing relies on Spotlight.

Raycast is good too.

Agree. Sherlock products were allowed, not blocked.