If you are serious about working in a terminal, then I highly recommend learning modern replacements for the old tools.

In this case ripgrep (or rg) https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep is phenomenal. Especially for searching recursively in a large directory tree it is unbelievably quicker than regular grep.

It won't be installed on any random machine, so grep is still useful, but if you regularly need to text search in files then there are better tools.

The fact that Kbin is handling the wave worse than Lemmy is not unrelated to the fact that Lemmy's tech stack is much lighter weight and more efficient. It is a fundamental issue with the technology. If either are going to become major players then they need exponential growth, and Lemmy is just better at that.