Per discussion with Elena yesterday, we're marking this as Resolved and following up with a broader post-launch task to re-visit the flow of the language selector.

there might be an opportunity to collaborate with the language team here! i was recently chatting with @Pginer-WMF and he told me that the language team is working on Codex-powered ULS, more on T287860: Support for a Responsive Language Selector. We could share with them our different use cases, and explore together how the next gen ULS might be able to support wikifunctions too, both for the global language selector, but also for language selection across the different views.

Hello! Does this task still exist as an issue or are there any updates to this?

In T335922#9724989, @ecarg wrote:

Hello! Does this task still exist as an issue or are there any updates to this?

i'd say this is still an issue, but we have to balance between what we think it's critical to do in the near term, and what can wait on the new version of the ULS, that we could (maybe?) also use on wikifunctions.

the tradeoff here is that everything we do for improving the global language selection is going to be developed, and maintained by us. so, we have to carefully decide what we think is worth doing in the short-term, and what instead can wait for longer, until the ULS is able to cover also for our own use cases on WF.

@ecarg -you're right - the overall state of the language selector has been improved. I re-checked the reported cases in the task description. Below is the summary of the current state:
✅ DONE (1) The language codes are recognized now (checked on wikifunctions beta and wikifunctions wmf.1) and the matching language will be the top suggestion. Also, there are more information added to the suggestions - the language code, a description, e.g. Natural language or some info on the lang script if the matching search result is found: e.g. Devangari script. That improves user experience in selecting the language they intend to add/select.

E.g.

`it' -> Italian	tsi -> Tsischian

dev - languages with Devangari script in description

When search doesn't return matches - the languages will be displayed in the default order with the indication that the search term was not found:

The other cases
(2) - the granularity of suggested languages is still present - i.e Canadian English and Simple English will be in suggested languages list. I'm not sure whether is it an actual issue though. What, for example, should happen if a user selects Simple Englishin terms what is an expected impact on UI (or the backend). However, this is a minor issue, pinging @AAlhazwani-WMF.

✅ DONE (3), (4) - are not present anymore.

thank you @Etonkovidova! agreed with you. i'll move this to verify in prod, even if it's already being done! :)