Obviously you can’t search contents in encrypted state, and with E2EE this means that server-side search is not possible.
I rarely use indexed file contents search (filename search is usually enough and that works well, and tools like grep work transparently), however the Boxcryptor drive can be added to the Windows Search Index (or whatever search software you use), and I assume it’s similar on Mac. You don’t have to decrypt manually. Indexing causes more system load due to the necessary decryption, of course.
On desktop systems I always store all relevant data locally, exactly for the redundancy. I’m not sure what you mean by “big encrypted files”, because each original file is encrypted individually and thus has basically the same size as the original.
Also searching files was impossible unless you downloaded everything, decrypted it, and searched locally.
I quickly realized it was adding huge delays in my day-to-day work and a lot of stress during time-sensitive tasks.
Have these e2ee overlays improved in usability since then?