Post Leap 15.6 to 16.0 upgrade: should I diff /usr/etc with /etc?

Thank you, that’s very clear.

There are exceptions though, most prominent being glibc marking /etc/nsswitch.conf as %ghost causing it to survive update.

That was the first one I ran into.

If you find a package that does something different, I would say it is the topic for bug report.

Possibly with shadow. I’ll investigate and triple check before filing a report.