I just ran into the same issue doing a data export migration from 12.5 to 15SU1a. Did you ever figure out what the root cause was?
Edit: In our case we ended up re-running the data export as the error message seemed to indicate that an expected file was missing. After doing this the next attempt to perform the direct migration to v15SU1a was successful. So it appears that the data export file was just messed up in some way.