Unrelated to the specific upgrade issues, there's a larger problem with Debian since the switch to "systemd". Namely, if any upgrade touches something controlled by "systemd", the odds of being able to do a clean shutdown/reboot drop to approximately zero: the shutdown process hangs due to services which became "unregistered" to allow for their replacement, and you then have to hit the reset switch.
This is in no way a good thing. My disks have been scanned by fsck far more often than would otherwise be necessary over the past several months. I suppose I should be grateful that the resulting mess seems to be getting cleaned up reliably -- thus far. If userspace doesn't get touched between reboots, there's no issue: kernel upgrades in recent times cause no more "excitement" than they traditionally have :-). --Bob