Couldn’t agree more. 

I do understand that there are situations in which the child’s autolayout must be changed in order to make sense. For example, if the child (and all its children) were previously set to “Fill”, if the parent container changes to “Hug”, then “fill” on the children no longer makes sense and cannot even be computed, so I get it that the safest behaviour here is to set them to “fixed”, although the preferable solution would be to set the immediate child to “fixed” (which resolves the loop issue) but leave all sub-children to “fill” (which I don’t think Figma is currently doing).

What I’d like to see though is some way to recursively apply an autolayout to children and children of children etc, because more often than not if you want to change the parent from Fill to Hug or vice-versa, you’ll need to change ALL the children to match. 

I landed on this post because I just needed to do that, and I’m now going to waste 15 minutes digging through my nested hierarchies to update everything (so I figured why not waste another 5 minutes Googling and then griping to Figma. It’s probably not time well spent, but what the heck. I can always dream that someone reads these things.)