I’m not sure what you mean by vscode running locally with editing via ssh. I’m fairly certain that when you do a remote connection in vscode, it literally runs the vscode program remotely and you are just connecting to a tunneled web interface. The only thing running locally is the Electron browser shell. So, remote “find in files” is running remotely, so it should be as efficient as it would be from that side.

That said, you can also open a terminal in vscode and use grep. If you’re running remotely, the terminal is also remote. That’s what I normally do.