Comment # 5 on bug 1203869 from Thorsten Kukuk

(In reply to Axel Schwarzer from comment #4)

> and according to https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_UsrEtc the
> locally adapted login.defs still resides in /etc/. Or might that be the
> point?

I don't know which changes you or your colleagues made to the system.

The switch to pam_motd is over a year old (June 4th 2021) and works for
everybody else.
The move of login.defs to /usr/etc is even older: Oct 7th 2019, so three years
old.

You should really try to learn what changed in Tumbleweed in the last years and
use the new ways to configure the system, development didn't stopped with Leap.

If you have your own /etc/login.defs file, it will completely overwrite
/usr/etc/login.defs and you are yourself responsible to make all necessary
changes to your local copy.
Better to put your local changes into a file in /etc/login.defs.d, like with
systemd.

So move /etc/login.defs away and put all local necessary changes into a
separate file.