A contact can not be found by name in dialer but exists in contacts
I had the same problem with Huawei P10, but it seems I could solve it. Within "Contacts" there is an option called "organize contacts" and within that "Rebuild index data". I tapped on it and when rebuilding completed (within a couple of minutes) the feature of getting a list of contacts as a string, contained by their name, is being typed in worked again.