If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.
I do the same and AWS ES works fine. I did try Elastic, performance was bad. They run it in containers internally!
Of course, my company was willing to pay $100k/mo to log every SQL query in existence but wasn't willing to pay for AWS support (of course it would have required paying something like 1% of our TOTAL aws spend, not just aws elasticsearch, although we could have probably created a subaccount or something)...so maybe the experience is different if your tickets actually get answered.
What was bad about performance in particular? You were just seeing less throughput per dollar spent or what?
Yea, I got bit once by one stuck blu-green. Root cause was zero free disk space, I now keep it at 25%
And we do pay for tech support, im in luck here :)