In order to not cause inconvenience to other contributors, I created a (very hacky) semi-automated script to fix the conflicts caused by this commit on existing PRs and I ran it against all the opened PRs that had been updated in the last 6 months.
Thanks for the suggestion! While rewriting the history may work in some situations, this was done on a big opensource project with almost 8 years of git history, >36K commits and thousands of forks. In this scenario, rewriting would have caused high disruption to the contributors