@RainTown Thanks for all your input on this. I think my process is valid, however I have one piece that is still an issue for me, is trying to figure out why restoring single indexes apart of a data stream does not restore their backing indexes.
The documentation says snapshot restore data stream indexes and backing indexes
If you restore a data stream, you also restore its backing indices.
But it also says it doesn't if its single indexes?
You can restore only a specific backing index from a data stream. However, the restore operation doesn’t add the restored backing index to any existing data stream.
From my testing, on a fresh cluster, If I try to restore one or more indexes with a snapshot, the indices get restored, however the data streams do not have them in their backing index. Is this expected? I made a post about it here The proper way to reindex a data stream index - Elastic Stack / Elasticsearch - Discuss the Elastic Stack if you're interested in more context.