I am no fan of a lot of the design choices or the effort required to operate large ES clusters, but there are easily several hundred man-years of development effort behind ES. It would be a really long time before a team starting from scratch could produce something better.
Check out some of the things going on in the Rust space MeiliSearch and QuickWit are 2 options emerging (targeting slightly different use cases), and Tantivy -the Rust equivalent of Lucene- is looking really good.
We make it much 10x cheaper and easier to scale and operate.
We store the index on Amazon S3.
I can’t say I disagree. Lucene is a beautiful, scientific thing; but ES is an increasingly-complex mess of opaque API’s and broken promises. Search engines are really, really hard. There is so much room for something better, more full-featured, more tunable, more reasonable.