I use rg on a very large project (8.5 million LOC, 5.2G of files including the build). Searching with rg takes less than 2 seconds and I don't ever have to think about it. rg automatically handles not searching the build files and autogenerated files which often contain lots of matches but are never what I want to search. Additionally, rg has an excellent --vimgrep feature which makes it easy to integrate with the vim quickfix list.

Vanilla grep, meanwhile takes 30 seconds -- too long to search while maintaining flow.

For me, the whole thing _is_ that it is faster than grep. AFAIK, a lot of its speed is due to breaking compatibility with grep to allow for more convenient defaults (skip binary files by default, skip .gitignore by default, etc) which also happen to be faster. For me this is a clear win-win.

Also, I have an 8 core machine. To be waiting for a 30s search knowing 7 cores are doing nothing makes me sad.