I am that guy that you met working in a networking role that knows nothing.

I'm the guy this guys is complaining about:Have You Ever Met People Working In a Networking... not the Actual Guy, I hope, but I've come to a pretty big, private manufacturing company with 35ish facilities across the US, Canada and Mexico. Through a lot of circumstances I have become the network lead on all things not core routing. I develop our configs for our sites from the layer 3 device down to the the switch-port, specify standards for labeling and wiring etc...but I don't know anything I haven't had to fix. Which comes down to my question: A colleague implemented a network change that segregated a flat /8 (using 100.0.0.0/8, hooray!) to a proper 10.x.0.0/16. It was a nightmare as it's a 28 switch network (all 48 port 2960s or x, now) with a c3850-24xs at the head. Several of the ports show multiple neighbors on the port. There are a couple of common threads, but I've gone through the entire chain a couple of times enabling "spanning-tree portfast bpduguard" and verifying nothing is hooked into itself. I can't find what I assume is the loop.
This is the thing that I need to know: Does LLDP use BPDU's the same way CPD does? This is, again, a manufacturing group so many of the switches (even the cisco industrials) will use MST instead of PVST and LLDP instead of CDP due to IEEE standards and licensing. Do I need to enable LLDP on all of these switches and see if any ports get shut down?

adding pic: https://i.imgur.com/tJpjxSw.gif edit: All of the above switches are actual neighbors some are just showing up on several ports.