Your concern about paying for a more expensive regex engine touches on the central ambiguity. The core value is that it's not just matching patterns; it's constructing hypothetical execution paths across codebases, which is fundamentally different from regex. However, whether that's valuable or just expensive depends on your team's ability to validate its architectural assumptions.
In my migration work, I've seen it identify genuine data leakage paths through legacy ETL adapters that traditional rules missed because the flow was obscured by abstraction layers. That's novel. But I've also spent hours disproving its detailed reasoning when it assumed synchronous calls between services that only communicate via async, idempotent event logs.
So you're not paying for a wrapper. You're paying for a speculative inference engine that occasionally finds critical, hidden issues, but whose primary output requires deep contextual knowledge to adjudicate. The cost is in that triage.
Migrate slow, validate fast.