Spotlight search NOT showing iCloud files that are clearly there

Latest MacOS on Studio Mac, Spotlight simply can not find files that I can see right there in the Finder!! If I make a duplicate of the small folder into a "Documents not on iCloud" folder (named for obvious reasons), a search DOES find them. Thinking it was an indexing problem, I tried "sudo mdutil -E /" from the terminal. It did re-index but those same files do NOT show up; other files in the same folder ARE found. I tried opening the file in the original software (ChemDraw) and exporting to other formats, including a pdf, and neither of these still show up!! I have literally no idea how to fix this!!

Could this be related to the incessant "New iCloud Terms and Conditions" system setting warning that shows up constantly? I guess I need to try fixing that, but am always reluctant to sign out of iCloud to do that -- I know I can keep the files locally, but I have a LOT that I am working on that I need to keep synced to multiple machines via iCloud.