Why can't I relink unless file name is exactly the same?

A bunch of work was done syncing audio and Multicam angles using the camera raw clips and Optimized Media was used to make proxies. Because of a still unaddressed bug in Resolve, the connection to the Optimized Media was lost. So rather than mess with that any more because it's obviously not ready for production, we are relinking the camera raw to Proxies we rendered ourselves.

The problem is, since the file name is not the exact same because our proxies our .mov and the Camera raw is .ari it won't allow us to batch relink which is a huge issue. We are now being forced to Relink files one at a time manually, and along the way we are losing all of our logging notes as well since Relinking the file also clears out all of the logging columns. So a double whammy.

What I don't understand is, if I can reconform a timeline from two separate collections of files with different extensions, why can't I do this with a bin? This doesn't make any sense.

You can. There's a lot of info about reconforming from a bin in the manual and you can choose what information Resolve will use to match the footage.

Reconforming only works when you are trying to link a timeline to a new media source. It doesn't work on the bin level so that I can maintain my audio sync and multicam sync and logging notes.