Rename Column or Table without breaking reports/dashboard

Related Thread: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Changing-name-of-a-measure-results-in-broken-visuals-in-related/m-p/1017456/highlight/true#M92344

Adding  Greg_Deckler to the loop for expert thoughts as he had also commented on a similar thread asked by Jame5_Blonde2,)

Hey mwegener,

This a very old thread and we know Power BI has evolved in great magnitudes since then. Since this question is not closed yet, I though we could help clarify this for future seekers. If a detailed explanation is already out there, I wasn't able to find it 😞

How did Microsoft manage to not break visuals when you rename from Power Query or PBI Desktop

My take is that they achieved it by leveraging the lineage tag. Almost all objects( table, column, measure, relationships, reports, pages, datasets, worskspaces, tenants) in Power BI has a lineage tag (UUID) which we can see on external tools like Tabular Editor, APIs, PBI service etc. Using this unique lineage tag, Microsoft also seems to ensure the relationships are intact when you rename columns which are related to other tables and load it to Power BI.

So when you perform these renamings on Power BI desktop, the visuals don't break and Power BI keeps the integrity of the report. However, when you rename the measure name in an external editor such as Tabular Editor 2, even though the Lineage tag doesn't change for the measure, when you SAVE to view the changes on Power BI report, the visual is broken. I haven't tried TE3 but I am guessing it is the same.

My current hope is that when Microsoft addresses this, they can also ensure that renaming anything on the THICK dataset of Power BI, will still hold its integrity across its corresponding thin reports even on the service.

Please share your thoughts on this topic and some insights on why this is difficult to achieve?

Happy to raise another request if this won't be helpful in reaching the larger community.