How-to batch relink to files that have been renamed when they all need to be in separate folders

Here’s the situation: We renamed hundreds of files when the brand we work with did a big naming update. Thus across my team we have hundreds of broken links to dozens of documents.  I am trying to find a way to avoid manually relinking hundreds of files in Illustrator documents.

I tried running a .jsx script in Illustrator that was similar to one I used in Indesign that was able to do this. In InDesign I was able to search by the first 12 characters of the name since that part of the file remained the same (only the middle part of the file changed). It worked beautifully and I was hoping I could get Illustrator to do the same thing. Within a few minutes, it was able to perfectly relink hundreds of files.

However, with Illustrator, after much trial and error I came up against (what CoPilot told me was) the hard limitation of Illustrator’s API. It does not store broken-link filenames as plain filenames so it can’t perform a direct filename matching.  I tried to go about this in several ways (creating an excel spreadsheet with Find/Replace columns, searching by the first 12 characters like the InDesign script etc), nothing worked.

I then came upon the concept of creating alias folder (a “hub”) for all of my files. Essentially creating one folder that has all the “correctly named files” that are really links that point to the correct file on the server. This way we would still be able to have only one file per asset in our library (in case it is updated, then it will update everywhere) but we would be able to have Illustrator automatically relink to the alias folder (since it would have the file’s original name). I was hoping that if I showed my Illustrator document this new folder with all of the “correctly named links” then it would automatically relink all the missing files in the document. 

However, upon some experimentation, it seems Illustrator will not automatically relink all the files in the folder since it knows they are not real files, only aliases. So I would essentially need to relink all my aliases one at a time, which completely defeats the purpose of having made the alias hub folder in the first place. 

So what is the solution here? Can anyone help me batch relink all of the renamed files? It would save us hours of work if we knew how to direct Illustrator to the renamed files. They all have a logic to the naming but they have to stay in their own folder structures.