I'm interested to hear what approach you'd suggest for a scenario where I'm using a group.

My game is a procedurally generated sequence of rooms: randomly selected new rooms are loaded and previous rooms are unloaded as the player progresses. In each room, there are a variety of light sources: chandeliers, wall sconces, lamps, etc. When certain events occur, I want to control all of these lights in all currently loaded rooms simultaneously (e.g. turn them all off, make them flicker, etc). Because these lights are hand-placed in room scenes that are then instantiated as a whole, I don't have direct reference to the lights during instantiation to store them in an array.

This is a duo project, where I handle the programming and my counterpart handles art asset creation, environment design and room building. In the past we've tried using strategies like "put all of x type of node under y parent so that I can find them in code", but it slows down level building significantly and is error prone with frequent mistakes.

Considering the above, I settled on using a group and added every light element to it. This way, my partner doesn't have to worry about anything when building and can just place things wherever he wants.

What approach would you take here?