is this needed still? it has conflicts currently

It's still valid. I may get back to it.

Would be nice to see this happen still. I'm sorely reminded of it every time I run ostree admin config-diff and have to swim through the output.

Yeah, but the priority for me dropped way way down since for Fedora now we don't use devicemapper by default for Docker, and that makes LVM make backups way less often.

I'm going to close this PR. Originally it was created to handle https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1365297 but the fix that we're going to invest time in is a more generic fix for solving lost /etc/ changes that were done post upgrade but pre-reboot problems.