One thing i did do, which I probably shouldn’t have done, is copy and paste a title from an old post to a new one and then manually change some words in it and the permalink it crreated to reflect the content.
Apart from that, I used a sql command to change the site and home URLS in the local, development version of the site not the live one. I don’t think I changed anything in the live phpmyadmin as the site itself is still navigable.