If you visit any of the new reports, eg anything in report builder, or  report/configlog/index.php and then go to filter things, the default state of all the filters which are of type string as set to 'any value'. It would be much faster and more obvious if the default state for all of the would be 'contains' with an empty string. 95% of the time the main thing anyone would want to do when filtering is contains, so its 2 less clicks to get to where you want to go. Semantically they are exactly the same, and I haven't checked under the hood but I'd hope that the sql it generates would detect the empty string and functionally do the same thing too so there is no performance impact.

eg Proposed new default state in configlog filters:

It's also hard to see why you'd retain the 'any value' option at all. For comparison I spend most of my time in metabase which is an open source BI tool and it has similar dynamic filters but it doesn't have an 'any value' option. I've checked a few other reporting tools: google analytics, matomo, and report builder in totara and none of them bother with this either.

Metabase:

Google analytics:

Totara: