I don't see it addressed in the article, but Elastic 8 has ANN support, and every other feature you'd expect out of a ranking system. Vectors are only one piece of the puzzle for building such a system. (honest question, not trying to troll, as I truly do <3 these pinecone articles)
(Similarly, Y not Solr, Vespa, etc etc) :)
We always encourage folks to do their own testing. Everyone has different performance requirements, data shapes/sizes, budgets, and expectations of the user experience.
Elasticsearch is a great option. But clearly there's a large cohort of smart teams that decided the combination of performance + cost + scale + [etc] on Pinecone makes more sense for them.
IMO - the real reason "Y Not Elasticsearch" is not because they're dumb or its bad. It's actually because they're not building for the search / AI market like you all are :)
When someone runs out of RAM with their Numpy array, they google, and you guys come up really speaking to that audience, building features, showing people how to build specific solutions, etc.