> I do not want to have the information of "which characters are special only when escaped in base grep" in my brain

Tangential but relevant to the Edit thread today were vis was mentioned, “No more {very-,}{no,}magic modes with different semantics and escaping rules. Instead we use the familiar and predictable POSIX Extended Regular Expression variant.”¹ is a real advantage over vim.

¹https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Vi(m)#...