I'm using unattended-upgrades 2.9.1 from Debian 12, and I've been having issues with /etc/apt/sources.list being recreated when I remove it. I manage all my sources through /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, and I remove sources.list as part of my system configuration to make this clear.

I've taken to linking it to /dev/null as a workaround, but I find it rather unexpected that unattended-upgrades would recreate this file when it does not exist. The problem was reported in the Debian bug tracker (https://bugs-devel.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1025147) back in 2022 but didn't see any activity.