They're not the silver bullet many initially hoped for, they're not a complete replacement for simpler methods like BM25. They only have very limited "semantic understanding" (and as people throw increasingly large chunks into embedding models, the meanings can get even fuzzier)
Overly high expectations lets people believe that embeddings will retrieve exactly what they mean, and With larger top-k values and LLMs that are exceptionally good at rationalizing responses, it can be difficult to notice mismatches unless you examine the results closely.