Specifically, I am trying to search for description ~ "Severity: High" (or others such as "Severity: Low") but every JQL I've tried doesn't actually do exact phrase searching but rather it is just searching if SEVERITY and HIGH both exist in the description.
How do I search for an exact phrase in the issue description?
I've tried it in quotes and I've tried a few other suggestions, like \"Severity: High" "Severity??High" ... "Severity:^High" ...description ~ '"Severity: High"~1' ... AND description ~ '"Severity: High"~0'
but in all of the above cases if you would replace the word High with anything else in the description, such as "main" -- it clearly shows it's not searching for that as the exact phrase word for word, or there'd be 0 results in that case.
The documentation for advanced Lucene in Jira doesn't seem to actually work. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/search-syntax-for-text-fields/. But I'm also 1000% certain I've done this exactly JQL search in a past Jira life at another company, but there I self hosted, and this is in the cloud. We do have word stemming enabled, too, which is also turning up more matches.