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> If nothing else it means airports will stop needing to re-paint their runways periodically.

Airports have to repaint their runways far more frequently than the multi-decade timespan it takes to shift 10 degrees due to wear-and-tear, weather, resurfacing, etc.

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It changes regularly, and by significant amounts. Magnetic north can drift 45km to 55km per year, and in the article it was talking about a major airport in Canada, the Calgary airport, where even slightly out of date maps were off by as much as 7°. Source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/tracking-changes-earth-magnet...

Will it require repainting? Probably not, but the further north you go, the more noticeable even minor drift or fluctuations will be.

I'd wager that maintenance repaint (in place) is less costly than repainting at a different location, which requires additional expertise

you do not repaint in different place, you change the numbers at most, because unless you rebuild the runway you're not going to change its axis to which paint marks locations are referenced.

You can’t just arbitrarily change numbers though. Lots of documentation needs to be updated with a number change.

True. But I'd say not as much as people might think, assuming (oops) that people check NOTAMs

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