The _field_names field used to index the names of every field in a document that contains any value other than null. This field was used by the exists query to find documents that either have or don’t have any non-null value for a particular field.

Now the _field_names field only indexes the names of fields that have doc_values and norms disabled. For fields which have either doc_values or norm enabled the exists query will still be available but will not use the _field_names field.