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In my experience, the pain of dealing with changes outweighs the pain of dealing with boilerplate, so it's better to explicitly write out save and load functions manually than rely on reflection.

Also means you can do stuff like if(version<x) { load old thing + migrate} else {load new thing} very easily. And it's just code, not magic.

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That's essentially what this system does — it identifies the models and their properties that you've marked as serializable at build-time using source generation, and then allows you to provide a type resolver and converter to System.Text.Json that lets you make upgrade-able models with logic like you just described.

The assist from the source generation helps reduce some of the boilerplate you need, but there's no escaping it ultimately.

Something like DB schema upgrading would be good but if you have versions you should be able to do that just fine. Reflection and changes are not at odds.

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