[rom-antics]

This is megabytes (at most) of text we're talking about, not gigabytes. And ripgrep is absurdly fast. Grepping a 5MB text file should be pretty much instantaneous.

[jhgg]

Do you know of any service that is running at scale out there that stores their data as 5mb plain text files?

[selfhoster11]

The “text files” don’t have to be the primary backing store - merely a derived cache file that can be periodically refreshed with new content. It doesn’t have to be text either - SQLite is pretty structured if you need more features in a minimal container too.