Umm..I _am_ talking about the free text search. Miles superior is NOT miles faster when you want speed. You need not change tabs, fiddle laboriously with the finicky scope drop-down and create custom scopes. Instead you execute an ripgrep command with filter directories (or load alias/from history), pipe to neovim and get auto-preview of results, including surrounding preview code. You don't have to load a huge project and wait for looong code-indexing.
if you can't see how this is miles superior to IDE grep (esp when exploring a number of large projects), then there's no use arguing as you've made up your mind you just love being in the IDE for no actual rational reason.
Hey, you are the one who moved the goal posts fist by bringing up use-cases like surrounding preview. You can use ripgrep -> fzf -> bat in one single command if you want to stick to the CLI for fast search previews. But I personally like neovim's comfort better and it is extremely fast to load compared to Intellij. (Not to mention, you can keep feeding the quickfix list more search results from other places)
if you can't see how this is miles superior to IDE grep (esp when exploring a number of large projects), then there's no use arguing as you've made up your mind you just love being in the IDE for no actual rational reason.