pcregrep is not automatically installed with Debian but it’s in the official repos. It seems common to get:

pcregrep: Too many errors - abandoned.
pcregrep: Error -8, -21 or -27 means that a resource limit was exceeded.
pcregrep: Check your regex for nested unlimited loops.

But it will help in many cases. I can see that it works on sufficiently small files. I noticed the built-in grep function for emacs can be modified to use pcregrep w/-M added instead of grep, which I find quite important because emacs makes it very easy to jump around to visit different results. In the end it’s still a hack.