[CDK] how best to move from App to Stage

A while ago moved all our infrastructure from manually defined infrastructure to AWS CDK for easier management. We followed some tutorials for this and ended up with a CDK app that contains multiple stacks. Now we want to move to AWS CodePipelines for the CI/CD of our infrastructure, but this requires that the Stacks are part of a stage.

This presents a problem, as adding these stacks to a stage (instead of an application) means that the stacks are prefixed with the name of the Stage, which causes a recreation of stateful resources (such as DNS, and Databases, Cognito UserPools).

What is the best way to move these stacks from the application to a stage? Ideally, without recreating the resources in the stacks, or renaming the stacks.

We have found various articles that say some resources could maybe be moved, but this a highly involved process that seems overly complicated. Source: https://binx.io/2022/06/30/migrate-resources-across-cdk-stacks/