Upgrading existing components to use Properties

Hi everyone, sorry if this has been discussed already, I searched in the forum, but couldn’t find an existing thread.

How are you upgrading components to take advantage of the new Component properties without messing up existing instances of variants that will be removed?

Within our team, we were discussing two options:

1. Just accepting the fact that clicking on those instances will show the Missing variant warning.
2. Creating a brand new component with the same name, while deprecating the previous component by adding a “_deprecated” suffix and hiding it from publishing. That way old instances would still link to the deprecated component. But this would create issues in cases where a component is nested into another component.

Components versioning would be awesome when a heavy restructuring is necessary! 🙂

Thanks to everyone in advance!