The quickest way to lose a decade of search visibility is to rebuild a site with a tidier URL structure. The new structure is usually better. It is almost never better enough to be worth the loss.
What actually breaks
Every inbound link from every article, directory and partner page that ever mentioned you now points at a 404. Redirects help, and they are not free: each one is a hop, and chains of them get truncated.
We keep the URLs and change what is underneath. It is less satisfying and it costs the client nothing.
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