The thing though is that you don’t actually want to rewrite at runtime; thats the hacky solution which ends up as layers of rewrites.

You want to rewrite at compile-time, rewriting the codebase itself, and save the changes to version control. As if a human were updating to a new schema. You don’t want to allow stale, unversioned schema-references littered around the codebase itself; being valid by the time it executes is fine and well functionally, but hell to follow