@Mark_Lynch Thanks for your feedback on Full Text Search. It is still beta, but the team has been making improvements based on user feedback and an ambitious backlog.
The Full Text Search beta is currently Atlas-only, however we have recently added support to the free and shared tier (M0, M2, M5) clusters and are working on bringing this to the M10/M20 tiers. For some context on what’s involved, please see Text Search in M10/M20 and watch/upvote the associated suggestion to Support M10/M20 on the MongoDB Feedback site.
There is also a suggestion to add ability to test Atlas Search locally that you can watch and upvote on the MongoDB Feedback site.
Outside of testing on a free/shared Atlas cluster (which doesn’t meet your requirement for fully local testing), coding a fallback query is probably the best option at the moment.
Regards,
Stennie