Had a stray thought:
What if you received current time-walking iLvl weapon relics for completing legion timewalking dungeons and current ilvl relics from legion keys if, and only if, your character has completed at least 1 artifact quest.
The powers wouldn’t be enabled again or anything like that, just a way to make the items pseudo heirloom items and breath some life in to these things that we can’t delete or remove anyhow.
Honestly I would just prefer if items from the current time walking era. didn’t scale down even lower. The bow from TBC and warglaives come to mind…
Like that’s cool and all. Hell during bfa when they did the crunch I tried a few times to get my artifact upto the cap of 265 by farming new relics. And then again in SL which for a while had a cap of 80 (which has since been changed). But that was just completionism and really only “benefited” that character with that spec.
What would be cool is if blizz fully added artifacts as heirlooms (I’d still prefer to keep my old ones in my bags for reasons) and then as you said allow socketing of relics to increase that heirlooms strength so that all characters on your account using said spec can be conferred the ilvl benefits. And yes even with them running around with weapons with 2-3x ilvl vs what you can get regularly.