Thanks Drew. i appreciate your help.

I was able to make the component read the sysId from properties and when i run it locally it is picking up the default sysId value provided. But when i deployed it on the instance forcefully using 'now-cli develop -force' (as per docs it should overwrite with the latest update in the component) the changes are not reflecting in the instance. I do not know if the instance is supplying the sys_id to my component of the current opened record or not.

How do we test the components in such cases? deploy them to instance every time when we make change?