Good extension of your question, and yes you are “right” but also a little bit “wrong”.
Right in terms of the fact that it IS hard to juggle all those files (N.B. Games is not at all the main part of what I do, and many others will have a LOT more experience in this area than me).
And wrong as there ARE ways to search for tracks or markers and events in Nuendo. It is not perfect but it does work (using the PLE).
Structure and naming conventions will also help. And having a clear structure would make finding the various sound iterations pretty darn quick so I don’t quite see the main problem that you do.
If you Know that MAGICSPELL-MEANMAN1-05 is a problem you will have to know what project it is in. Logically the magic spells will be in one project, and of course it’s name then ought to be MAGICSPELL. Then you can use the PLE to quickly locate the correct export marker which ought to be named MEANMAN1-05. Basically its two steps. If you keep all assets in one project then yes the processing chains etc may just be to convoluted. But this will of course be determined by the type of aset delivery you are doing.
If you are delivering to a game implementation then there is a very specific workflow you just have to adhere to. I have not yet explored the possibilities using the Perforce versioning sever solution, but I think it would also help quite a lot when dealing with massive deliverables to large games.
If you are making Sound effects to sell, then you just create your master files and sell them (yes a good system is of course still needed to be able to trace back to the original if a sound needs to be remastered because of a mistake, but it is not at all the same workflow ashen working with a game.
When working in a film or TV context most work will be within a context, either to picture, or creating specific type of source material for a location or a specific usage. So it will (most of the time) be relatively easy to find the correct piece of data.
But whenever we work with large datasets and many sound files it does become tedious. and of course sometimes when you do a mistake, or forget to correct that pice of data, then you are basically screwed.
I would almost argue that it is even worse in a film/tv context.Why? Because most editors do not spend the time renaming files according to their use (i know I don’t) so to find that exact combination of sounds used elsewhere you have to rely on your memory to locate to where it was last used. But as always, structure always helps in these situations.