One obvious explanation is the lack of indexing on the column you're searching over. It's currently an opaque blob, but a design that actually uses the database

One obvious explanation is the lack of indexing on the column you're searching over. It's currently an opaque blob, but a design that actually uses the database's features will serve you much better. What your article is really saying is, "SQLite isn't a good fit for our data that we didn't want to serialize differently to be efficient with SQLite." And that's fine, it looks like you found the right tool for your data and requirements, but the title is click-baity and isn't really about SQLite.