ive found ghostty to be a pretty decent replacement for iterm2, some bugs still being worked out and i havent always had the best luck with the guake dropdown style terminal but all in all it's pretty nice. sort of miss the additional hot-key invoking options iterm2 had (i could double tap control or cmd to invoke) and ghostty is a lil more limited there, but overall its solid, doesn't feel bloated. iterm2's settings gui was a total tragedy. there was some xterm related issue i ran into ssh'ing into a vps but i can't even remember for the life of me what that was.
i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with a config file allows apps like this https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2 either, which is super annoying.