That's pretty much the case. To narrow it down to specific parts of the playfield, you can isolate branches of the circuit by lifting wires and testing if the short is gone.

I don't know if you're shorted to ground or shorted to the AC return so DMM advice is going to be limited. Also, reading shorts with a DMM is not easy because if you read through a bulb filament, it has low resistance and all in parallel, so therefore looks like a short on the DMM.

Do you have schematics?

I would look at the suspect fuse on the schematic and trace out where it goes... where it branches off to several places, this is where I would locate those wires on the machine and disconnect one. Then test for the short. If it's gone, then you know the short is somewhere in the circuit connected to the wire you disconnected. If the short is not gone, put the wire back and try the same procedure on another one. The idea is to isolate sections of the circuit so to be effective, you're going to need the schematics... otherwise, it's tediously going through the parts with your eyeballs looking for bare wires touching things, etc.

You can obtain a circuit breaker of the same size as the fuse, and put that in place of the fuse.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/flexfuse-adapter-fuses#post-7461073

You can buy these Flex Fuse adapters and breakers, or you can get a breaker and solder it onto an old blown fuse. The breakers are available on Amazon too but you may be better off buying a set of various sizes from Troxel.

It's counterintuitive, but fluxing and soldering it more may help. Once you have new solder flowed on, then try sucker-ing again.

Also, do you have any de-soldering wick? I find it works where a sucker doesn't. Again, adding some fresh flux and solder first can be helpful.

The schematic shows the ELECTRICAL circuit connections... not necessarily how the actual physical wire connections are made. In other words, when an electrical schematic shows three things connected together, it does not care what order, right, left, up, down, how far apart, or if they're daisy-chained vs. home-run, etc. It's simply showing that those three points are electrically common.

No. Because, both switches have them, technically...

whether the cap/resistor physically resides on one switch or the other, or someplace else, they are still electrically connected across (in parallel with) both switches.

I think you missed my point... I advocate to learn the meaning behind the electrical drawing and then you'll be able to tell when a physical hookup follows the circuit.

As far as I can tell from your photo, yes, it matches the diagram.