Spotlight search is tailored for consumer documents: photos, PDFs, and spreadsheets. By default, Spotlight purposefully excludes hidden dotfiles (like .docker or .npm), Library folders, and system container volumes from search results.
Consequently, if an uncompressed 20GB virtual machine or orphaned screen recording is located inside ~/Library, standard Finder search will report zero results.
XrayMac bypasses Spotlight index limitations by crawling the raw APFS directory tree using high-speed POSIX kernel calls, instantly surfacing all files over 100MB, 500MB, or 1GB regardless of where they reside.