Recently worked on an interesting case. Customer had an existing Merge Replication and it was working fine.
They added a new article to the existing Publication and ran the Snapshot Agent.
Now Every time Merge agent runs we see that Schema changes were getting re-applied.
At the start of a synchronization, the schemaversion of the subscription is checked against sysmergeschemachange by the Merge Agent, and schema changes are applied to the subscriber accordingly.
Ran these queries on the subscriber
>>>
select max(schemaversion) from sysmergeschemachange
–22
select schemaversion, pubid, subid from sysmergesubscriptions
where pubid<>subid
schemaversion pubid subid
15 A0B0FAA8-22B9-4CC5-8AED-547F2EBCEB83 85CD9161-5659-42CC-A501-BB43072B0045