How to get sortBy to behave in algolia instanstsearch v3.5.4

You don’t.

It’s broken at the moment and until this gets released you should hardcode your instantsearch npm module to v3.5.3 in your package.json

GOOD "instantsearch.js": "3.5.3"
BAD!! "instantsearch.js": "^3.5.3"
BAD!! "instantsearch.js": "~3.5.3"

make sure that you don’t have the little hat before the 3 or you’ll lose many hours of your life and the will to live debugging the problem you think you fixed.

Having the hat/carat (^) or squiqqle/tilde (~) will mean that the package will upgrade itself to any minor or patch versions, which will break your sortBy again.