> While this fixes this feature, it bloats the image for a feature that is > seldom used.
Seldom used? I think of apropos and man as the most fundamental commands in the Unix ecosystem. They are the first thing I mention, when people ask me about learning (or mastering) the system. Bloat? The last live image I built occupies ~2215 MiB. In it, "tar czf - -C /var/cache/man . | wc -c" prints 421793, less than one fiftieth of one percent of the image size. In a smaller live image with fewer packages, the cost would be even less than 0.4 MiB.