Escape char for TEXT find?

I only talking about ordinary macOS-type CMD-F find that uses the right-hand inspector. If I want to find those Wikipedia footnotes, which are of the format [8] and replace them all, how can I do this?

Use *? Sounds good, but if I activate Enable Operators & Wildcards, the [ and ] become inactive. Escape the square brackets? That’s what I’m asking about.

Or is this the wrong path?

[ and ] are not indexed, afaik. If you want to replace them, you’ll probably have to resort to scripting