We have one project with bunch of components, and a few projects that don't use that field. We were thinking combining projects, but we still want to know which "project" an issue belongs to. We were thinking of using components for that. But we don't want to necessarily throw away our older finer grain use of compnents. So we were thinking can we move the components to labels and free up components for use?
This raises the question why not use labels for the new thing and keep components? The only reason I can think of that semantically components are close to what we want, and components can have default assignees, which might be nice.