I find myself using ctrl-r less and less as I make sure that anything of value that I work out goes into a Makefile or the app tooling, for me this is the basis of the dev-ops approach to work (make sure everything is scripted, not worked out on the fly).
Ctrl+r is great, sometimes. History saving sucks which can make using it difficult, but i usually use it out of laziness than trying to recall a command, especially with ssh or repeated iterations requiring flipping between two settings/states. Its hard to rely on it for other things, but its still super useful.
I use history | grep quite a lot, because of the non-fuzziness with default ctrl+r. If I know exactly what the substring is, then that's great, but sometimes I also want to see the sequence around the command too (e.g. two step processes like eval ssh agent + ssh add key)
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