It definitely depends on what you're doing with it. In the article the author is using it to parse only nginx logs to report page hits counts - I probably would have not gone with Elasticsearch to begin with. I find it strange that the issue with InfluxDB was the lack of 'Group by'; you can use 'Distinct' with other aggregation functions with the same result - and without having to write and maintain your own stack.

I appreciate - and often indulge - in writing stacks of software that are better implemented other open source, but I wouldn't say that the article describes a solution that is viable as a replacement for Elasticsearch.