If they did, they would have noticed that the columns were empty (because they were wiped clean for PI data).
The parent is either misrepresenting the situation or they didn’t do what they say they did.
Also in any production setup, before the migration in the same transaction you would have something along the lines of “check if the column size is larger than and then abort”, because you never know when that can be added while working on the database.
I agree we could have done it a lot differently and safely, I especially like the last point you mentioned that is what would have been the correct way to do it.
But this happened as described, a local only script that generated a list of columns to modify then a migration to execute the alter queries for all of them.
The parent is either misrepresenting the situation or they didn’t do what they say they did.
Also in any production setup, before the migration in the same transaction you would have something along the lines of “check if the column size is larger than and then abort”, because you never know when that can be added while working on the database.