Yes the way tracker-extract is managed changed in Tracker 3.7 because there is greatly improved sandboxing of the extractor now, so it has to be managed in a special way. (You can read a bit of background about this here - On CVE-2023-43641 – Carlos Garnacho).
Can you open an issue against tracker-miners for a documented way to do this ?
In the meantime, i suspect if you do rm /usr/share/tracker3-miners/extract-rules/* you’ll find the extractor no longer processes anything. Let me know if it owrks.
After removing the contents from that directory and logging out/logging in, I can still see the tracker extract process in execution:
/usr/lib/tracker-extract-3 --socket-fd 3
but I guess it won’t do anything.
However, the journal now generates an entry of this shape each time I change something (e.g., create, modify, remove) in one of the directories indexed by tracker:
By my tests on a VM with snapshots, that entry is generated anyway in such a situation, even when the extract-rules directory is filled with its original contents.