My default approach is to use as few dependencies as possible for Proof of Concept experiments like this one, but it DOES favour convenience over long-term efficiency and performance.

I think a single-author blog is about the limit for what can be handled by my flat-file + working memory approach. Any dataset that's much larger would almost certainly need a vector-friendly DB. Typesense looks like it might be a good fit, and so does the pgvector extension of postgres