Stale Pathauto Alias I'm just curious how other Drupal developers handle nested path aliases when they are based on another page's url pattern. 

I have a product landing page (it's a "basic page" node). When it's created, right now, the url is:

/product

For my product nodes, I set up a path alias to be 

/product/[node:title]

This makes my product detail pages nicely nested under "product." This works fine for a while. But later, if someone changes the product landing page url, the alias for the product nodes will not match. 

Say someone edits the product landing url to be:

/widgets

Then I have a /widgets landing page and a bunch of product nodes with urls like /product/product-name.

Is there a nice way to handle this? Or is it up to content creators to just know they need to update it?
You should use Pathauto if you aren't already. 

This has a feature (tab) that lets you bulk update the content type urls to /widgets/[node:title].

You should also install the Redirect module, so that all your former /products/[node:title] automatically redirect to /widgets/[node:title]. This is for SEO purposes, you don't want your Google listing pointing to a broken link, non-existent page.