That's fair, but how do you grep down to the right 100-200 documents from millions without semantic understanding? If someone asks "What's our supply chain exposure?" grep won't find documents discussing "vendor dependencies" or "sourcing risks."

You could expand grep queries with synonyms, but now you're reimplementing query expansion, which is already part of modern RAG. And doing that intelligently means you're back to using embeddings anyway.

The workflow works great for codebases with consistent terminology. For enterprise knowledge bases with varied language and conceptual queries, grep alone can't get you to the right candidates.