If you're that capable with grep, surely you've run into it's shortcomings and can appreciate attempts to improve the status quo. Like trying to find usages of a variable that is a substring of a word. Like trying to fix code where somebody else has used the variable name i. Sure, you can add matching on word boundaries, but then it starts to become a distraction from the original task at hand.

Your example matches the _text_, semgrep matches _the language_

given:

    if 1 \
        == \
        1:
        pass

then

    $ semgrep -e '$X == $X' -l python
    1:if 1 \
    2:        == \
    3:        1:
    ran 1 rules on 1 files: 1 findings

to follow myself up, one can also check for expressions like what I used as an example and say "don't do that", but without regard to what is inside the if

    semgrep -e $'if ...:\n  pass\n' -l python

It can infer (x==y) if x=1 and y=1, which is grep cannot do.

Well the demo is there on the landing page