Comment 6 for bug 1899272

Found a workaround, but beware here be dragons and this could kill your OS install!
Do not do this unless you know what you are doing!

After do-release-upgrade -d fails
cd /var/cache/apt
sudo dpkg --force-depends --force-breaks -i libnss-nis_3.1-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb

This will install the package that fails regardless missing deps and the possibility of breaking glibc.

Try upgrading again
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

This worked for me.