Misc changes from several PRs (look at individual commits)

[Ngalstyan4]

Made small changes and stress-tested the PRs locally

[github-actions[bot]]

Benchmarks

metric	old	new	pct change
recall (after create)	0.740	0.740	-
recall (after insert)	0.784	0.774	-1.28%
select bulk tps	164.285	163.450	-0.51%
select bulk latency (ms)	47.095	46.718	-0.80%
select bulk latency (stddev ms)	9.997	13.331	+33.35%
create latency (ms)	1495.074	1469.171	-1.73%
insert bulk tps	9.443	12.417	+31.50%
insert bulk latency (ms)	105.887	80.515	-23.96%
insert bulk latency (stddev ms)	3.466	2.031	-41.40%
disk usage (bytes)	6348800.000	6348800.000	-