Hi Andrew,
Apologies for the delay in response.
I think your assessment is correct reading through the code, but I also believe your assessment of the method to handle it locally rather than remove entirely would be the way to go. If you remove it entirely it can crash during deserialization if the entry it’s attempting to map to is not there.
Typically we follow a deprecation path for all these items, and increment e.g. FUE5ReleaseStreamObjectVersion and dummy the data, similar to how you’ve described, however if you did that in your local stream, you would end up with a nightmare issue of the UE5 GUID not matching Epics. You could implement your own, but really I think that should be only if you need to make a lot more serialization changes.
I think your proposed changes to handle this manually would be the best approach right now, so I think go with that and please let me know if you need further assistance.
Please note: Epic is on summer break for the next two weeks, so I hope this unblocks you in the meantime, and if any further issues I will address upon my return.
Cheers
Jon