Yes of course, this is the solution. You just have to allow to install apks from third party sites, where at this point Google urges you very strongly to reconsider, cause this is very often a very bad idea. And after this your have to switch off auto-updates for every app on your phone, which will also include not installing security relevant fixes, cause EN is not able to get its act together. Yes, that sounds about the right thing to do.
For me the most incomprehensible thing with this bug BTW is for me not the bug itself - bugs can happen. It is not even that they did not revert to an earlier version, cause I really don't know about the intricacies of the Google App Store (if you look at the troubles with the actual Windows Beta of EN then sometimes there is more in the background going on then we know). No, if you look at the first post in this thread, then you will realize that EN knew about this bug through its voluntary beta-testers all along, and they released it anyway.
This reminds me of MS, who were told bei their beta-testers that this Window release sometimes deletes all your data (which an OS really shouldn't do), and they too released it anyway. Somewhere in the management of EN somebody said "what the heck, we'll just release it, hardly nobody will notice". That our note-keeping app is unable to search for notes anymore.