Is there a way to search for a specific inactive user w/o add-ons?

Question

Once upon a time, you could search for any user, even inactive ones, by placing their username in quotes.  It seems now I can only search for inactive users in bulk and not by their user name.  We have MANY inactive users and need to maintain them for historical data purposes.  It is not efficient nor practical to have to traverse through many issues trying to get to the smaller subset assigned to or reported by one specific user.  Is there a way to do this in JQL that I am not aware of and haven't been able to find?

All I want to be able to do is create a search like:

project = ABC AND assignee = "john.doe" order by updatedDate DESC

Trudy P Claspill · Accepted Answer

Are you sure you have the correct full username for the user?

In our Jira Cloud instance our login usernames are our company email address. When I plug that into a JQL filter for Assignee I still get the relevant data for the user. I'm not a site admin though, so I can't confirm that the users have been deactivated. We are tied to a directory service where the user would've been deactivated, so I"m not sure if our Atlassian Site Admins also deactivate the user specifically in the Atlassian organization.