No, something was different
It hasn’t. That ~/.tb directory simply does not exist on my machine.
However, based on what /usr/bin/torbrowser does (thanks, that was helpful) and more poking, I think I get it now. (ed: I actually thought that was the browser application itself. Lot of difference in a hyphen.)
FWIW, I had an installation of Secbrowser on this machine, installed with sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends secbrowser ref. I apt purged it before I tried to use tb-updater.
To my surprise, I also have a secbrowser installation hiding out in /var/cache/tb-binary. (I don’t remember that!).
Ed: So torbrowser looks like it found tor-browser in /var/cache/tb-binary, and made a .tb in there.
$ bash x torbrowser
...
+ tb_user_home=/var/cache/tb-binary
+ '[' -n /var/cache/tb-binary ']'
+ echo /var/cache/tb-binary
+ grep -q tor-browser
++ dirname /var/cache/tb-binary
+ tb_user_home_dirname=/var/cache
+ '[' -n '' ']'
+ tb_install_folder=tb
+ '[' -n '' ']'
+ tb_install_folder_dot=.tb
+ '[' -n '' ']'
+ tb_browser_name=tor-browser
...
I might just make new Debian Template and start again.
Also, thanks for the links privileges.