The filtering and the search do use different underlying techniques to adjust the sort order. The sort by Creation (or modification) date should be the same, the difference is in alphabetical sorting. The old way used to somehow tokenize out a numeric portion to do a numeric sorting. The new way is a true alphabetical sorting.
For example, you would expect the following sorting alphabetically:
Old: 1, 2, 3, 004, 5, 6, 7, 008, 9, 10
New: 004, 008, 1, 10, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9
If the experiments are created in the same order as the numeric order, then a simple switch to ordering by Created (recent first/recent last) would give a descending/ascending order numerically. However, if the end user created 1, then 3, then 2, then this approach would not work.