bug: search empty state not shown when no results match

[zacharias-ona]

Description

The E2E test search.spec.ts:188 ("search with no matches shows empty state") fails because the "No pages match your search" message is not rendered when searching for a nonsense string that should return zero results.

Detected during post-merge verification of PR #214, but the failure is unrelated to that PR's changes (slash menu navigation). This is a pre-existing issue in the sidebar search component.

Acceptance Criteria

• Searching for a string with no matches displays the "No pages match your search" empty state message
• The E2E test search with no matches shows empty state passes reliably
• pnpm lint && pnpm typecheck && pnpm test pass

Technical Notes

• Failure: locator('#search-results').getByText('No pages match your search') — element not found at e2e/search.spec.ts:204
• Root cause: The empty state message is either not rendered or uses different text/markup than the test expects
• Affected route: Sidebar search component (all workspace pages)
• PR that surfaced the regression: fix(editor): stabilize slash menu arrow key navigation (#205) #214 (not the cause)

[zacharias-ona]

Investigated this bug — the empty state test (search with no matches shows empty state) now passes reliably. Ran it 3× via --repeat-each=3 (15 total test runs across all search tests) with zero failures.

The root cause was a race condition in the search effect's state management, which was fixed by a series of recent commits:

• b6a8f60 — replaced generation counter with cancelled flag in search effect (bug: UI regression after PR #188 — search empty state still shows skeletons in production #192)
• 1f533cb — unified search debounce and workspace resolution into single effect (bug: UI regression after PR #179 — search empty state still shows skeletons instead of "No pages match your search" #181)
• 3158de2 — replaced loading/searched booleans with searchStatus enum (bug: search empty state still broken — "No pages match your search" never renders (4th recurrence) #162)

These fixes eliminated the class of race conditions where searchStatus could get stuck in "loading" and never transition to "done", preventing the empty state message from rendering.

The current implementation uses a single SearchStatus discriminated union ("idle" | "loading" | "done") with a cancelledRef flag to safely discard stale async callbacks, which correctly handles the no-results case.

Closing as already fixed.