Perhaps Elasticsearch was chosen because they also index video comments and subtitles, making full-text search a key feature. But I agree, SQLite FTS might suff

Perhaps Elasticsearch was chosen because they also index video comments and subtitles, making full-text search a key feature. But I agree, SQLite FTS might suffice, and much of the metadata could be better managed using a traditional Django structure. It would be great to add embeddings to the index, possibly using one of your Python tools.