I never thought of Elasticsearch as a database and always designed systems around what elasticsearch is supposed to be an index based document store for used with search.

I think their API is great and have had amazing results with it. Their recent innovations around quantization (bbq) has been amazing for my use case building an agentic movie database for discovering movies and personalized movie recommendations.

There are benefits to not using your database for everything, even if it adds a bit of complexity by introducing another dependency. If the benefits out weigh the cost of complexity reaching for elastic has almost always been worth it for me.