[JohnBooty]

My experience was that this was not reliable. It was nearly always true, but not always, and tests would sporadically fail some small percentage of the time.

However, this was back in ~2015 and Elasticsearch 1.3 or something like this, which is of course a now-ancient version. Perhaps things are different now.

edit: Perhaps we were using the refresh command and not the refresh flag. It was a few years ago and I don't have access to the code any more, and my memory may be failing here. If the refresh flag works as advertised (enforces an index update and guarantees a consistent view of the data for the next query, which the command did not seem to) then that of course solves my initial problem W.R.T. writing tests.