Okay, that is what I feared. The feature class has a number of relationships, so it will be more work than just a straight forward copy and delete. I first have to delete the relationships and then rebuild them after. All doable...
On a side note, I wonder if Esri is really copying, deleting, and rebuilding relationships with ArcObjects. I suspect they are just tweaking the database metadata tables like updating the sde.gdb_items table. I am tempted to test in the dev environment. But it is too risky when I go to production 😒