And that Pi had 512MB of memory, initially even only 256MB. The 1GB Raspi 4 can be bought today for $35-$40. You can still get a Pi that is better in every way than the first one and pay practically the same.

You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the -jn/--jump-target=n option. For example, using .5 as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.

Either set the option within less with the - command followed by j.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export the LESS environment variable inside your ~/.bashrc to have less always behave that way.