Publishing database changes with SSDT that include altering data types of columns
I've been tempted to bypass that flag also but have come down on the side of your co-workers and now try to deal with these issues "correctly". The (marginally) less clunky route is to use pre and post deployment scripts to do the work with a rename.


Rename the existing table in a pre-deployment script.
With the existing table missing the table in focus will be created as per the new schema definition.
In a post-deployment script copy from the renamed original table to the new version.


Depending on the nature of the target you may of course need to take care of dropping and recreating foreign key constraints.