Been thinking and experimenting a bit relating to this. I’m sure all you wonderful Figma peeps are all over it, but thought I’d post anyway - who knows, maybe someone has already solved the problem and can tell me about it 
Sometimes I want to be using autolayout, for example in a long form, but I don’t want a change in the variant to affect the layout - opening a dropdown is the use case I’m working with at the moment. Issues I’ve struck/am thinking about for this:
- A possible workaround is to put the opened dropdown items outside the component frame ala tool tips, but then I can’t apply “while hovered” interactions
- if I’m placing elements outside the original frame, then I also can’t use “clip content”. That’s a problem for components that have scrolling content
- a workaround for the first workaround is to use a “mouse enter”, but then I also need to apply a “mouse leave” interaction, which is a bit redundant
- position of the new (non-autolayout affecting) variant needs to be controllable. I might want the dropdown menu to appear on top of the previous variant/state so that the currently selected value is exactly on top of the closed dropdown control for example.
- z-order in an autolayout when changing a component size that doesn’t affect the layout is a pain as well, but that’s been covered in other threads