The problem is that 'rarely used options of limited usefulness' can mean two things: options which no-one finds useful and options which only a small number of people find very useful.  It is Not Funny when people decide to remove some option which not many people used but on which some critical bit of software you rely on turns out to depend.

I think the canonical example of that in my experience was echo -n and certain shell scripts which may or may not have edited passwd files, in the transition from BSDoid SunOS to SYSVoid SunOS.  I remember that being very much not funny.

(Note I don't want to start a big argument about this, I just think it's a bit more nuanced than the minimalists sometimes think.)