Here is the community thread on the latest incarnation of the problem:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...otos-to-re-publish-for-no-reason/m-p/12690169
And a thread from the old feedback forum starting in 2017:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...blishing-and-smart-collections/idi-p/12250355
In that incarnation,
Adobe employee Rick Spaulding said, "Due to it’s obscure nature and that a solid workaround has been discovered we will not be expending any time or resources to fix it. It will only affect those users who are planning to migrate from a version <6.6 to a version >= 6.6 so that number is extremely small. "
I disagreed with his assessment that the number affected was "extremely small", since it affected anyone using a publishing service migrating to a newer version of LR. But at that point, there wasn't any point in arguing with a decision from the engineering manager.
In the latest incarnation, employee Rikk Flohr asked for a simple recipe to reproduce the problem. Not an unreasonable request in general, since without being able to reproduce a problem, the engineering team would have a hard time fixing it. I commented that such a recipe might not be practical, since you had to create a large catalog with an older version of LR, make edits probably involving older process versions, publish, then migrate to a newer version.
I suggested that if the engineering team wanted to solve the problem, it would be much more practical to get copies of some of our catalogs, which would allow them to reproduce the problem easily. No action was taken, suggesting that it wasn't of sufficient priority to Adobe to put in that effort.