I came across this PR while no-lifeing on the github. I don't want to give any of you who saw my pessimism on this article false hope, but it appears Image search is actually being worked on. And it looks like it may eventually be enabled for videos as well.
Note: this does appear to just be the ingestion portion, so nothing user facing yet. I wouldn't hold my breath on image search returning before 2027 gets here, but it's at least something after a month of nothing but adding and removing a maintenance message.
Update 1: I may have been conservative with that 2027 estimate. A search page is already being built.