I'm not the parent commenter, but the friction point for me is the slowness when typing the first few characters in an interactive search (I have a large history). I think the searches are synchronous with each keystroke, right? It would feel a lot faster if each keystroke could cancel an in progress search instead of waiting for it to finish.

In fzf, there is no noticeable lag when typing.

There is a noticeable delay experienced from when I press the up arrow and the list appears. This was the largest friction point. Then, once the list appears, it needs to be filtered to reach a desired pattern. Narrowing down the selection and experiencing real-time shifting in results distracts from the goal of history finding. I found these hurdles lead the results that still were not as accurate as simply ripgrepping against zsh_history.