I used to refresh the index patterns by doing
Go inside Kibana (Management > Index patterns), select the index pattern, and press the "Refresh" button at the top right of the window in order to pick up the mapping changes.
However, now that option is missing .
Yes, since 7.11, Kibana does the refresh automatically for you, no need to do it manually, it's done automatically whenever a new field is added to your index.
You can read more about the context of this change in PR #82223