While I'm a fan of Tika a lot of people get queasy from Java and XML, they might be better served by their preferred scripting language and https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF, which has the same OCR engine.
Not sure what you mean. Are they making Graal-builds you can run standalone now? I only use Tika through Maven at work, might not be up to date on what happens in the project.