Navigation in Office 365 / Teamsites / Groups / Sharepoint Home -- Where is Microsoft leading us?

By the looks of the views in this thread, it is quite a popular topic. I too am looking to implement an "intranet" in office 365 and i too am struggling with the concept of no global navigation.
While I do agree that users generally go to a search page to look for something, there is yet another user habit to consider, and that is Organizational/Functional searching. 
Global navigation exists in many cases as a psudo organization chart that users can easily and visually relate to. Now as seasoned SharePoint admins we know that org charts and names change and functions for the most part change very littles, hence there will always be some sort of structure this way.

I guess i would call these types of navigations "crutches". 

One of the most common website/intranet scenarios i want to get to is the "amazon dream". A search driven site that has it all in the context of a search box. But even Amazong has crutches. They have a departmental structure that you can fall back on in if you get to deep into your searches. 

THis alone leads me to believe that a global navigational construct is still needed in a corporate intranet system, especially if you are a new employee, or a geographically disperesed company.

My thoughts are that the dream of a "navigationless" intranet is something to aspire to, BUT, current reality dictates otherwise in many traditional orgs. Start ups seems to have a different way of achieving this, but even startups grow up. So what do you do then?

As a company with no real anchor point on 365 we rely on what we can see and have immediate access to and work within those parameters, but without a way to logically navigate the "intranet roads", how do your users actually find what they are searching for, especially if they are exploring and or they do not know exactly what they are searching for?

Perhaps I answered my own question by alluding to search result sources as being the crutches we need, but perhaps there is better way to achieve this that i am not thinking about.
It is 2018 now, so what have you guys done while  waiting for Hubsites to drop?

Nando