Your linked blog post was a really good read, but I'm not totally sure if the correct takeaway was that brute force outperforms "clever" algorithms. Unless I misinterpreted the results, FLANN and Annoy (which implement hierarchical k-means and a binary space partitioning algorithm, respectively) both ran about 100x faster than brute force.

Were you referring to the number of libraries the author couldn't get to work? This certainly might be a failure of over complicated algos, but it seemed more like an engineering failure than a performance failure to me.