Workaround to find Private Teams for Employees to request access

[luvsql]

Going off of this Microsoft document, there used to be an option to make a private team discoverable so that Employees can search the Team they need to access and request to be added.  We use Teams for projects, so we have many of them and we do not add every Employee to every project.    

Find and join a team (microsoft.com)

Microsoft support has confirmed that they removed the setting, yet will not help customers with any workaround.  Just telling a customer that all of their Employees now have to request memberships manually to the private team owners is not possible since every Team has a different owner and that information is also not searchable. Or I guess they want IT support to manually add everyone that requests access to each Team, which will then make us contact every Team owner to get their approval first, is also a huge step backwards.  

Why are we moving backwards to put all the responsibility on Teams and their memberships on IT admins again?  I've read there might be a powershell command to allow it to be searched but still hidden from the GAL, but Microsoft won't even look for that solution.  

[#2]

This is a case of a long drawn out head scratcher. Why the feature was pulled I have no idea but it is sorely needed. The only solution I came up with was maintain a list of Private Teams on SharePoint, with Join links if you want them to be able to just choose access to those. And or you could have a process to request access via flow, but there isn't a "Clean" solution at the moment for this still after many years unfortunately :(.

[#3]

@Chris Webb   I can't believe we're in 2022 and IT still has to keep manual lists of things to workaround basic workflows that Microsoft decided wasn't needed.  They do this all of the time.

What is even more confusing is they let members of private teams request memberships for other people, which then sends the request to the Owners, but not by the person that wants it.

So basically an Employee would have to ask someone on that Team (would have to get that from a list I guess too), then that team member could request the add and the workflow works.  Nothing makes sense why they would remove this feature.    

[#4]

Not sure what you mean by "which then sends the request to the Owners, but not by the person that wants it." The owner clearly sees who wants access and who has requested access on behalf of that person. The team owner can always generate a team code and share this code so people can join the team directly, skipping join requests.

Can't say why it was removed. Even the PowerShell parameter in Set-Team is deprecated.
-ShowInTeamsSearchAndSuggestions

But, seems to be available using MS Graph https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teamdiscoverysettings?view=graph-rest-beta

[#5]

Coming late to this, having done a lot of searching ...
Any ideas why this is still so difficult?
I have a private team, the main reason I want to be able to vet new members, is we have two hidden channels - "staff" & "Student" - the rest of the channels being open to all. When new people join, I'd like to add them quickly to the correct private channel
If they can request to join, it's relatively easy - approve, add to correct channel.
As it is now the only option I have is to leave it public, check regularly, then add new members to the relevant channel (and then use a tag to help me remember who I've added... )