I recently gained a liking to search result highlighting, it's much more useful than I originally thought. The problem is not the highlighting itself but its persistence. I added a few autocmds to automatically hide it in certain events and a manual shortcut. Works better for me now, though it is annoying that `:noh` has some weird special status that makes it nonfunctional in autocmd.
I evaluated few plugins around this and this one I liked the most:
https://github.com/romainl/vim-cool
I tend to avoid plugins for things that I can just do myself with a few keybindings or autocmds. I like that aspect of Vim (and Emacs) where the user is less reliant on plugins because there isn't really a clear, fixed boundary between configuration, scripting and external extensions. Though it comes with downsides (e.g. when plugin developers make the questionable decision of overriding user configuration).
Basically, whenever stuff "looks weird", just mash space in normal mode and it fixes it. The fact that I have this bound to something like space should tell you how often I end up using it. :)