If you lose the WAL you lose the data since the last merge but there’s no risk of corruption. The WAL handles missed syncs fine, too, missing losing just that window of data.
I don’t know if or how Postgres records the transaction number in the index to be able to notice if it’s out of date. If it does, I don’t know of any solution to “catch up” the index besides recreating it, which would be ok if that’s the only issue but from my experience with out-of-date indexes (libc or icu updates, where Postgres doesn’t know if anything IS broken and just reports that it could be), there’s no guarantee you’d even notice and your app could be running completely broken until you rebuild.
