Just in case someone finds this when troubleshooting the same issue:

Decided to upgrade my"fresh" serve and install CU13 => no issues

It seems that problem is related to the server itself, however I couldn't find where the problem is and covered many things.

Another wierdwieldg is, that on the server where replication was trowithrowingr, when I tried to disable CDC I got error:

“Msg 22831, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_cdc_disable_db_internal, Line 262

Could not update the metadata that indicates database XXX is not enabled for Change Data Capture. The failure occurred when executing the command '[sys].[sp_cdc_drop_objects]'. The error returned was 229: 'The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'sp_MScdc_ddl_event', database 'mssqlsystemresource', schema 'sys'.'. Use the action and error to determine the cause of the failure and resubmit the request.

“

Profiled disable command (broke it down to statements) and the only login/user context used is 'sa', service account and myself.

All logins are members of sysadmin role. Makes no sense.

With new set up everything is behaving :-), but still hope to find out what went wrong there...