What was true about Generic Article and Variants in SAP ECC 6.0 has changed from top-to-bottom.
With SAP S/4HANA, in keeping with SAP’s movement of Industry to Core, the implementation of the SAP Retail concept of Generic Article and Variants dramatically changed to align with concepts found in standard Variant Configuration (LO-VC). The result is significant technical change, but also significant business process change, as one would reasonably expect when master data concepts are rearranged.