I suspect, in general, age has a fair amount to do with it (I certainly notice it in myself) but either way I think it's worth evaluating new things every so often.
Something like rg in specific can be really tricky to evaluate because it does basically the same thing as the builtin grep, but sometimes just being faster crosses a threshold where you can use it in ways you couldn't previously.
E.g. some kind of find as you type system, if it took 1s per letter it would be genuinely unusuable but 50ms might take it over the edge so now it's an option. Stuff like that.