@krisfreedain I've been digging around the web - and there isn't a lot - but it seems that MediaWiki dropped Elasticsearch when it changed licensing (over 7.11 I believe) but hasn't adopted something new (e.g. OpenSearch). So currently the best search for MediaWiki (CirrusSearch) is strapped to an outdated Elasticsearch...which really isn't ideal.
It does seem like the sentiment was that OpenSearch would be a good alternative but no movement...and the plugin is literally hard-coded to