If we're only tying into LinksUpdate behavior, we'll need to make sure we handle moves/deletions ok still.

I kind of hate SearchUpdate anyway, so I'm fine with ditching it.

yup.

Chad informs me that this shouldn't affect users very much; this will move Cirrus from instant updating to it taking a few seconds (or, worst case, minutes), which is still a gigantic improvement over Lucene's once-per-day update.

For those following along at home the advantage to this is that if something horrible happens to Elasticsearch then users don't don't end up waiting around for it to recover. We're already getting most of the way there with Bug 57215 but this makes double sure of it. It also allows some cleanup from a code standpoint which is nice too.

Change 96898 had a related patch set uploaded by Manybubbles:
Perform Elasticsearch updates with queued jobs

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/96898

Change 96898 merged by jenkins-bot:
Perform Elasticsearch updates with queued jobs

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/96898