This topic has been apparently discussed before, but i want to make a post to emphasize the importance of this issue.

Detaching nested components inside components, breaks all overrides on the parent component instances. I claim this is a major problem, as it makes it really hard to migrate a design system to use properties instead of a vast amount of variants.

As an example, i work in a large company, that a lot of materials in Figma. The design system has been initially created a vouple of years ago, and at that point, we had to rely a lot on component variants that very often utilize nested component instances.

Now with the new Figma properties, and the apparently upcoming improvements on them, i could quite easily reduce the amount of variants by 80% in general, and make the components much more simple and foolproof. However it would require detaching a lot of the nested components, but it is practically impossible to do that, as there are hundreds or even thousands of instances that will then lose the overrides. To re-map all of them would take so many hours of work, that it is not reasonable. Especially hard this is because the instances are spread around a lot of files and pages.

I cannot stress how important it would be for Figma to implement a way to keep overrides in these cases. If the focus will be more and more in a true modular, variable and property -based components, there NEEDS to be something like this, or it will leave a lot of clients outside of the benefits of the new features, because there is no other way to migrate to using them, other than spending countless hours of manual work on remapping instances.

I pray and with you’d hear my pledge and i will promise to give all glory to you guys if this happens! 🙇‍♂️