What happens when someone asks you about one of those items? You consult your memory reserves, and you find that those are proper names of specific entities. So your brain returns those entities. Now there very well be a high school band called "Shirts without Stripes", you most likely would call up plain shirts or shirts with non-striped patterns. No reason that a search engine wouldn't follow the same rules (i.e., Google must have millions of entries for Doctors without Borders and Men without Hats).
IIRC if you use quotation marks in your search query, it would search for the exact match of that phrase without any search operators processed inside of it. So those scenarios you listed would still work fine.
Though I somewhat agree, I don't think that an average user even knows about existence of search operators in the first place, let alone being aware of this specific one and when to use it.
