hey everyone!
coming back with an update: we ended up migrating all our previous SQL scripts to a DBT project (https://www.getdbt.com/) - the reason for this was explicitly to make it easy to handle schema migrations in a hive metastore (we can't/won't migrate to unity catalog on a short notice).

What got me sold on DTB (the solution was proposed by someone smarter than me :))  was the fact that you can basically instruct it to handle migrations itself in a one-liner: