M2 URL Rewrites – Best approach?

I’ve tried googling this and I seem to either get answers that are unrelated, or answers that result in a dead end. In Magento 2 the url indexer has been axed, so it seems like Magento wants you to simply manually save all your products and categories in the event you want to change a URL. This is obviously not ideal, as some stores can have hundreds if not thousands of products.

Can anyone propose or suggest alternative solutions for this? Is this something doable via the API? Is there some miracle extension that can provide this with imports?

Sorry if this is lacking details or information, but on M1 this was pretty much a no-brainer thing, to me. Run import -> run index -> done. But now there is no index, so….