It turns out that full-text searching requires that you enable the “Accept connections from within public Azure datacenters” option in the CosmosDB networking blade. The Cognitive Search service is not hosted in the VNET (although you can enable the private endpoint for security purposes – it doesn’t use this as its outgoing network). This presents a slight security risk that may not be tolerable for sensitive data. Now, the ability to find the exact CosmosDB you are looking for is if you were so inclined is practically non-existent. Trying to brute-force multiple CosmosDB services is likely to set off some alarms in the datacenter, and still won’t get you in (the keys are really quite difficult to break).

So, practically speaking, I don’t feel like this represents any significant risk in terms of organizational data. But I hate checking off boxes that allow more unsolicited traffic.