relinking media when moving a project between mac and windows

Not sure how useful this workaround will be, but I've got a client working on a mac and I'm at the moment working on windows.  I have a clone of her media drive with the same name and I have HFS+for windows so i can read a drive that's formatted macos extended.  She sent me a project yesterday and I had to relink all the footage.  Not a big deal relinking everything.  We worked for a bit today with me looking over her shoulder via zoom and she sent me the updated project (which she'd don a save as with todays date).  I tried to open the project (while my last project was still open) and the locate media dialog came up.  I cancelled and had a brainstorm.  Instead of opening it as a separate project, I imported it into the project I had worked on before.  Lo and behold, all the media was connected...  Not sure how practical a workaround this will be but there's something going on here...

We're both working in CC2019 on this project...