> Yeah, my computer is fast enough that I can just do "find . -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext {} \; | grep -i someSearchTerm" and come back later.

You may be interested in my ripgrep-all [1] tool, it should allow you to search those tens of thousands of PDFs in under a second (with hot cache)

[1] https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-ta...