From my own experience, what worked better for me was:



- Reactivate and place a mini-site on ugly.com (keep the content closely related).

- Once indexed, simply place a link in homepage content to beautiful.com. I use to put 5-10 articles on the site, just to make it appear legit and whatnot.



You also pass some additional relevance in this way to the new project (content being in the same niche)



The good part: You can also link to a couple of your other projects as well, later in the line. 2-3 links are not a PBN. So you get to pass juice to more than one project, while via a 301 you would pass to only one.



You also get to keep the domain live and explore it a little, maybe it lives for another day and turns into something else.