It's quite normal that you perform an in-situ upgrade, just follow Bill's advice. The gotcha that I've sometimes seen is that the 2016 DB software becomes 2022, but the compatibility level of the DB file stays at 2016 and needs to be upgraded as well.
I like your approach of taking lots of snapshots as you progress. I'm very risk averse and take exactly that approach for upgrades and patches.
One thing that I've sometimes seen is that there can be good value in creating a new database, and new geodatabase and then migrating datasets. It's a big exercise, and hard to do if you're using traditional versioning, but it gives you a nice clean container and a fresh start. The ability to do this depends on many things, but could be worth exploring if things aren't too complex in your workflows.
Scott Tansley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotttansley/
