I recently found out that you can prepend your search with "name:" and windows search will only match against filenames which is the behavior most users expect by default and much faster than whatever nonsense windows explorer search normally does. Example:

    name:search-term

VSCode has a progress bar (well a throbber) that shows up when the language server has waited long enough that the UI should show some activity. But for my workflows it only shows up when something has gone wrong. So when I see it, it’s a good indicator to either restart TS server or reload the whole window. Not a great experience or solution!