I held out on the new search tools for a long time, partly out of stubbornness and partly because grep -r was already in my fingers. That ended this year. I now reach for rg and fd without thinking, and the few times I land on a box that doesn't have them, I feel the loss immediately.
The speed is the headline, and it's real, but it isn't what converted me. It's the defaults. rg honours .gitignore out of the box, so it isn't drowning me in node_modules and build artefacts before it finds the line I want. fd does the same, with a saner syntax than find's wall of -name and -type predicates that I always have to look up.
The habit that made it stick was a couple of aliases I won't admit to, plus learning the handful of flags I actually use: -i for case-insensitive, -l for filenames only, and -t py style type filters. That's about it. The rest I look up the once-a-month I need it.
Old tools earn loyalty, and there's a real argument for knowing the lowest common denominator that's on every machine. I still do. But on my own kit, life's too short to wait for find to walk a node_modules tree it should never have entered.