If any of you have ventured into Maya 2022 yet and have found yourself authoring rigs in there that has then needed to be opened in earlier versions of Maya, you've probably noticed deformers tend to break.
The Problem:
"If you have component tags enabled in 2022, deformers are created in a much simpler way than before. They don't have any groupParts or groupId nodes and don't have deformer sets. All of that is stuff that 2022 no longer requires thanks to the component tag work, whether or not you're actively using component tags. This isn't backwards-compatible, since deformers in earlier versions of Maya require these nodes to function."
The Fix:
"If you want scenes to be backwards-compatible, you need to disable "Animation > Rigging > Use component tags for deformation component subsets" in settings, which will cause deformers to be created using the older method. This needs to be changed before creating any deformers, since it only affects newly-created deformers."
This useful information was brought to my attention by my good rigging buddy Lasse Rassmussen, which originally stemmed from this post in the Autodesk Forums.
