It feels like the list of programs with this property was autogenerated by a script from a database field, because they all have the same explanatory text. So

It feels like the list of programs with this property was autogenerated by a script from a database field, because they all have the same explanatory text. So probably the point is that there are some commands for which this is counterintuitive (really, quite a few are out there), but I imagine that once they decided to represent the "can read files if run as root" property in the database, they felt they needed to add this flag even to those commands for which this is the entire point of the command (like head, tail, cat, or pagers or editors).