[InsideOutSanta]

One of the best things I did on my Mac was disable Spotlight and use a search tool that doesn't rely on its index.

Spotlight used to be amazing, but my impression is that it has become really buggy in recent years, filling my disk with garbage and often using a lot of CPU on its indexing threads.

[Cthulhu_]

I have some hacks to make Spotlight not try to for example index the millions of various node_modules files, but it shouldn't need hacks to do so.

[chrisandchris]

Ehm, isn't that going to System Settings -> Spotlight -> Privacy options and adding the folder(s) there?

[QuinceOver]

Interesting. Can you recommend the search tool that you use?

[InsideOutSanta]

I use Find Any File, but there are several others I haven't tested, so I'm not sure which is best. FAF works for me.