This is a backport of #54803 for 7.x.
This pull request cherry picks the squashed commit from #54803 with the additional commits:
6f50c92 which adjusts master code to 7.x
a114549 to mute a failing ILM test (#54818)
48cbca1 and 50186b2 that cleans up and fixes the previous test
aae12bb that adds a missing feature flag (#54861)
6f330e3 that adds missing serialization bits (#54864)
bf72c02 that adjust the version in YAML tests
a51955f that adds some plumbing for the transport client used in integration tests
Co-authored-by: David Turner <david.turner@elastic.co>
Co-authored-by: Yannick Welsch <yannick@welsch.lu>
Co-authored-by: Lee Hinman <dakrone@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Andrei Dan <andrei.dan@elastic.co>