SharePoint Online vs. Microsoft Teams for Project Management and Cross-Site Document Searchability

Hello:

I am the PMO Senior Manager for a large global CPG company's R&D department.  Note: I am in the business (not IT), and can't get the guidance / options / clarity I need before choosing to implement SharePoint Online or Microsoft Teams for the purposes of 1) equipping my many project teams with a central hub to store, share, retrieve project documents & information AND 2) allowing Google-like (I mean "Bing-like) searchability across all project documents (includes both inflight project or completed projects [archived]), strategy docs, etc.

Currently my group doesn't really have a viable ECM solution in place.....project teams seem to store key project documents on their personal computers and share them with project colleagues through email.  This of course is risky, inefficient, and leads to rework.

My IT department has provisioned me with a brand new clean SharePoint Online site; however, the build will seem to require a significant amount of effort (on my part) to generate 100's of subsites and a nightmare to manage & administer.  The reason I say this is that my R&D group is aligned to 8 pillars (or platforms), 40+ programs (that align to one of the pillars), and 100+ projects (that aligns to one of the programs).  Note: I'd implement Live Tiles or another "Mega Menu" add-on solution to achieve this; however, my IT group won't support SharePoint work that is not "out of the box."

The other option that I just learned about is Microsoft Teams (which apparently has a watered down version of SharePoint specific to each individual Team generated).  The big big big negative that I see with Microsoft Teams is that you cannot search for project documents across private Teams SharePoint sites OR repurpose MS Teams SharePoint sites as SharePoint Online sub-sites.

Do we go with 1) full SharePoint Online (to achieve a single searchable source), 2) full Microsoft Teams (with siloed SharePoint sites that are not cross searchable), or 3) somehow a hybrid of both?

Is anybody else experiencing a similar dilemma?  Any suggestions are welcomed and much appreciated!

-Doug

ddoerhoff@gmail.com