Thanks for your comment. I upgraded through the KDE Discover, and I believe there was no alert/warning of such.
Alas, damage is unfortunately done, both to the configs and to my confidence in Fedora. Luckily this computer is not my daily driver, and the customizations were minimal (for terminal, screenshot, and various Emacs commands).
You are right, perhaps it's either time to change the distro or write some code to enforce certain minimal settings.