The sync feature is great, though there are many oddities with search sort order, unnecessary terminal cleanups, odd timeouts, etc. In some aspects it's a big upgrade from fzf, in some aspects it's a downgrade.
The sort order is strange, I agree. I forked Atuin awhile back with the goal of adding more strategies, but it was tougher than I expected. IIRC, changing search order involves updating both the DB queries and how the application code interacts with them.