How can I specify “Kind is not chat transcript”? There’s no “not” option that I can find.
Instead of using [F]ind, have you tried using Spotlight? If so, are messages checked in System Preferences?
If you have, try rebuilding the index: In Sys Prefs>Spotlight>Search Results, uncheck “Mail & Messages” (and leave it unchecked), then add your drive to Spotlight’s exclusion pane, wait a few minutes, then remove the drive from the exclusion pane, wait for Spotlight to rebuild it’s index.
There’s no easy, built-in way to access a readable form of iMessage texts or images outside of Spotlight, from what I can tell. Years back a few people posted to Reddit or StackExchange some Bash scripts to export the chats.
Many people use the excellent 3rd-party app iMazing to perform back-ups of their iOS devices, and that includes being able to access Messages chats.
Thanks; I’m just trying to get a list in the Finder of files I’ve opened in the past 24 hrs. I want to exclude messages from that list. But I don’t want to exclude messages from all searches. (And I don’t use Apple Mail.) It’s just puzzling to me why there are “is/is not” options for other search criteria, but not that one.
I don’t know if you can do that in the Finder. But it’s fairly trivial with HoudahSpot, which is a 3rd-party search app which leverages the Spotlight database; I hide Spotlight in a 2nd menu in Bartender, and use the Spotlight key-command to instead invoke HoudahSpot, which I use 99% of the time for my macOS searches:
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I just discovered today that if you search for an extension using HoudahSpot, you have to leave the dot out. That was annoying to figure out 
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I was trying to do the exact same thing following the recent MPU…and gave up. It’s a perplexing omission.
Oddly, there’s an “is/is not” option for that in Automator, so I think I can use that to get what I want.