I don’t know specifically what issues you would find if you didn’t, but you will need to when moving between the master and dev branches. The way Things are defined is different between master and dev, so it is more than just updating channels. @chris has posted about it in the forum somewhere. It really should be in bold at the top of the Zwave Refactoring thread, but I’m sure it is in there somewhere.
This is what I do (120 devices)…
There is an ESH PR (linked in my post) to correct this, but it has been on hold for a long time.
It’s possible this is a new bug, but it’s possible deleting your Things after changing zwave bindings could resolve this. I delete all my Things after even a binding update in case there was a change to one of the devices I use.