Please notice that people themes that wants to be compatible with GitHub pages is stuck using older SASS, since GH-Pages is stuck in Jekyll 3.x and thus locked to jekyll-sass-converter-2.x.
If you don’t mind keeping compatibility, there are only a few changes needed. I believe SASS team added a tool to automatize most of the changes. I’ve documented in my blog the changes I’ve applied to my SCSS to be compatible with modern SASS (content in pt-BR) Atualizando o SASS do Computaria .
The main changes:
the darken function
@import deprecated (this might need to change some variables and how you use it)
placeholder selectors like %vertical-rhythm/%clearfix must be rethought, if they are declared in one file and used in another