Let's say I want to assign attribute "Ingredients" to my products.

Since a lot of this products may share the same ingredients, it would be logical to create attribute "Ingredients" with type "Option", populate value table with all ingredients I might need or/and add new ones along the way.

So it would look like this:

Item-1: attribute: Ingredients - values: Ingr.-1, Ingr.-2, Ingr.-3

Item-2: attribute: Ingredients - values: Ingr.-1, Ingr.-2, Ingr.-4, Ingr.-5

or just implement a new type of attribute "Multiple Options"

I'm actually surprised that this is not a feature out of the box