To expand on the point, /usr still has to support the shared NFS mount model that has mostly been irrelevant for 20 years, the old perl alternatives was partial

To expand on the point, /usr still has to support the shared NFS mount model that has mostly been irrelevant for 20 years, the old perl alternatives was partially written to deal with that case. I am pretty sure python2-minimal still triggers update alternatives to support that shared filesystem model. Putting the named links in /etc allows for local configuration and keeps links DAGs