This is fallout from WT-11525. During the code review, haribabu.kommi@mongodb.com pointed out that the bug would not have happened if the append and search code used the same approach when walking the tree.

Currently, append calls tree_walk while search uses a bespoke binary search on record numbers.

This ticket is to choose between two approaches - either having search do a tree walk, or having append reuse the search code. This latter approach would require a refactor. Neither of these approaches being realistic is also an acceptable outcome, but there should be good reasons.