Technology selection is a black art in many companies. Sounds like people were open to listening to the opinion of a developer in your case. Often-times the selection heuristic is habit or history. The right companies will pay more attention to reasoned arguments of their own developers.
The wild part about it was that they were trying to use elastic search for relational queries because some manager thought it would be faster than a relational db. (It was about 60x slower)
