[hkt]

Why not?

Well, if you're self hosting for yourself, friends, and family.. it isn't likely to be a thing you'll want to care about fixing when it eventually breaks in mysterious ways.

Better to use sqlite or just a blob of yaml in a file if self hosting might be involved.

[Jolter]

Sure, you’re hosting a few hundred or thousand videos, a blob of yaml can be good enough. I have no history if this project, but I suspect they started out like that. Something like Elasticsearch usually comes into play when you are ingesting a lot of data point very quickly, so I would assume the authors wanted to archive fairly huge amounts of videos.