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A good IDE can be so much better iff it understands the code. However this requires the IDE to be able to understand the project structure, dependencies etc. which can be considerable effort. In a codebase with many projects employing several different languages it becomes hard to get and maintain the IDE understands everything state.

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And an IDE would also fail to find references for most of the cases described in the article: name composition/manipulation, naming consistency across language barriers, and flat namespaces in serialization. And file/path folder naming seems to be irrelevant to the smart IDE argument. "Naming things is hard"

And especially in large monorepos anything that understands the code can become quite sluggish. While ripgrep remains fast.

A kind of in-between I've found for some search and replace action is comby (https://comby.dev/). Having a matching braces feature is a godsend for doing some kind of replacements properly.

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