"... trying to find where things happen becomes an exercise in search."

It seems like developers actually prefer large codebases and having to use recursive search through multiple layers of sub directories

I prefer no sub directories and being able to just grep against *.[ch] with no recursion

I think projects in Java languages are the worst when it comes to having to search through numerous small verbose files having barely any substance to them. IDEs probably make this easier but I don't use one

Years ago I read that Whitney's "IDE" is something like the Windows console and Notepad. He has said in interviews that he wants all the code to fit on a single page

What about `grep -R .`?