ECK elasticsearch pod not starting on AKS : max virtual memory areas vm.max_map_count [65530] is too low, increase to at least [262144]

Yes thats right .

Disabling this option is just a temporary solution and should not be done for production clusters.

Ideally you need to get this done from admins if you don't have access :

sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144