By hooking into C++ compilation, Kythe is giving you things like _macro-aware_ navigation. Instead of trying to process raw source text off to the side, it's using the same data the compiler used to compile the code in the first place. So things like cross-references are "perfect", with no false positives in the results: Kythe knows the difference between two symbols in two different source files with the same name, whereas a search engine naively indexing source text, or even something with limited semantic knowledge like tree sitter, cannot perfectly make the distinction.