actually forcing a rerender of the children might also work

IMO that's a pretty big smell if something depends just on the metadata. I would definitely move the metadata into the actual data to avoid any ad-hoc fixes.

@U2FRKM4TW ok so how would I go about changing this? I have some function deeply nested that receives data with metadata attached? based on some key in the metatdata I would also like to update the children.

second ? -> .

As I said - I would just move the metadata to the data layer. Then just query that data, that's it.