> since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.

That's one interpretation. I've another, which I've seen play out multiple times now across multiple OSS projects: company invents a thing, thinks that because they're the inventor of said thing they'll be able to sell a managed version of it, belatedly realise that inventing a piece of software doesn't magically make you the best in the world at running it at scale.

What Elastic, and most like them, can't compete with is the ability to run highly available/reliable software at the scale of Amazon.