Found the problem with my operator-family changes: by fetching from

pg_opclass during LookupOpclassInfo(), I'd turned pg_opclass_oid_index
into a critical system index.  However the problem could only manifest
during a backend's first attempt to load opclass data, and then only
if it had successfully loaded pg_internal.init and subsequently received
a relcache flush; which made it impossible to reproduce in sequential
tests and darn hard even in parallel tests.  Memo to self: when
exercising cache flush scenarios, must disable LookupOpclassInfo's
internal cache too.