replicas have been there for ever, and 1 replica was/is the default too, at least to my recollection. Disabling this come's up every now and again, e.g.
What maybe catches you out is that means your cluster state is yellow, which is not an issue for testing. But it a little bit fools you here as your cluster is going to be yellow for the unassigned shards reason, but your actual/original problem was you likely had no shards left, as the unassigned ones counted towards the 1000, which you (and frankly I) didn't initially realize. This likely inhibited the cluster from creating the .geoip* index, as it needs a shard for that too.