Like the OP and maintainer said, no one ran into this for 6 years—that's a darn long time in the lifetime of a program. And, as the maintainer said, "it was never meant to affect non-error cases." He pushed a change to fix that [1] and this won't break any builds in the future.

Personally, I really appreciate that a little whimsy was added into a terminal command that's literally built for reading manuals for command-line programs. IMO, this was a net-positive for humanity.

[1]: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...