[CuriouslyC]

This is worth emphasizing. At scale, and when you have the resources to really screw around with them to tune your pipeline, rerankers aren't bad, they're just much worse/harder to use out of the box. LLMs buy you easy robustness, baseline quality and capabilities in exchange for cost and latency, which is a good tradeoff until you have strong PMF and you're trying to increase margins.