Property 'itemInstances' and 'processOrder' not valid in version 48.0 error when deploying in Production, even though Production is 49.0

Question

When trying to deploy the converted metadata using VS code sfdx force:mdapi:deploy deploy to my Production Org and I get the error Property 'itemInstances' not valid in version 48.0 and Property 'processOrder' not valid in version 48.0. But when I go to Developer Console and open a class, even though it says 48.0, I have the option to select 49.0, so I am assuming I have 49.0. Yet I get this error. Pretty much all my classes, trigger and components are version 48.0, but I am not sure how that affects flexipages and Approval processes.

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue.
Changing the version number in the metadata.xml didn't help, unfortunately.
However, when I increased the sourceApiVersion number in the sfdx-projects.json file (to 50.0 in my case), I was able to deploy the page.
Version number 49.0 will do the trick, too, since the itemInstance was introduced with version 49.0 (see here).

Answer 2

The solution is, in the converted metadata package which was created using sfdx force:source:convert there is a file called package.xml, search and replace 48.0 with 49.0 and it deploys.