I decided to do a comparison between this format and the 2012 format. As a reminder the continental qualifiers gave Africa 50 spots (+2 tripartites) to be used across the 10 men's events (some events got 6, others 5 and others 2), for every athlete qualified in the respective event from a different event one less would go to the continental qualifier. Algeria qualified two athletes outside of the continental route therefore Africa had 48 quotas. For 2016 Africa received 30 quotas, 3 per event.
13 different nations qualified here while 19 qualified during the 2012 qualifiers. If you adjust for the quota difference 16 would have qualified assuming everything was equal. Uganda and Lesotho qualified athletes after failing to qualify in 2012 while Ghana (4) and Gabon (2) were the nations which qualified multiple athletes in 2012 yet failed to qualify in 2016. One thing that surprised me is that I thought the top nations would retain their quotas better while the lower nations would suffer from the lower quotas for the continent, but after adjustment the only top nation which did better was Algeria (qualified 5, 2012 adjusted was 4) while Morocco, Cameroon and Egypt stayed the same.