Apple seems to have updated photos to search by date properly again. It used to be that you could search for any photo on a given day from any year. That changed awhile back and a search for photos on July 28th would be first a search on “July” to get everything in July, then “28” to get all of the photos for the 28th. Unfortunately it also searched on text so if any picture had the number 28 it in you’d get those too.
That type of search stopped working in Photos for macOS Golden Gate and it seems that searching on “7/28” works again!