This reduces the impact of restarting the search service, as the site information takes a few minutes to load during which it's not available. It also permits exposing this information via API in the future if there is interest in this.
The assistant service was also modified to do a late load of the suggestions trie, as this is a major contributor to its start-up time.
Finally, some changes were made to the client library, a new get() method was added that takes a TypeToken to allow deserialization of generics such as List<Foo>, and the scheduler was also modified to use virtual threads.
... also move some common configuration into the root build.gradle-file.
Support for JDK21 in lombok is a bit sketchy at the moment, but it seems to work. This upgrade is kind of important as the new index construction really benefits from Arena based lifecycle control over off-heap memory.