I am assuming that the issue that’s being discussed here is what happens when a draft topic is published to it’s destination category. The same rules are applied to publishing a shared draft as are applied when a topic is recategorized, so both cases can be handled here.
With the current functionality, users who are watching a category will receive an “edit” notification when a shared draft is published to its destination category, or when a topic is recategorized to the watched category. Edit notifications do not generate emails, so users will not be notified by email when the draft is published.
I think this is a regression. The issue with notifications for recategorized topics was discussed previously here: Notifications when a topic is recategorized.
Whether a “posted” or an “edited” notification is created is set by the value of the new_record parameter that is used in the call to post_alerter.notify_post_users in the NotifyCategoryChange job. That parameter defaults to true, but it is now explicitly set to false in the job. This is a recent change. There may be a good reason for it that I’m not aware of.