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If you change the unit, I think the variable should be changed everywhere.

It's hard to know what assumptions code is making and by forcing you to change the code everywhere (which should be pretty easy in any modern IDE) you at least have a chance to evaluate any issues that unit change could cause.

Someone doing a half-assed refactor doesn't mean it's "dangerous" to encode a unit in a variable or function.

I do agree that generally it's better to use something like a struct that's more flexible, but doing that for every function is also quite verbose. For some functions the time requirement may never change as well.

In this specific case, it seems like creating a new property with the new data in a new name would be the safest path forward. Ensuring the unit are in both property names will prevent confusion.

This sounds like a feature to me and modern IDEs make this type of simple refactoring quite straight forward for most languages.