I agree, it's a great tool with a catastrophically wrong default that silently and unpredictably catches people off-guard. I've tried using ripgrep many times but have been burnt too many times and can never trust its search to be comprehensive. It absolutely fails to find important stuff, and I can rarely predict whether the files it's going to skip intersect with my files of interest. And at this point I'm too burnt to care to pass flags to stop it from doing that. Which basically means I always run grep unless I know the number of matches beforehand and it's too large a directory to wait a few seconds for, in which case I run grep after rg fails to find it.

If it actually matched grep's contract with opt-in differences that'd be a gamechanger and actually let it become the default for people, but that ship seems to have sailed.