Function boundaries, arguments and data types will get you a long way in my experience. Sure there are times when you need to look at local variables in the middle of a function etc, but half of those times DWARF won't have the register information anyway. Remember the use-case here is production, your code will be optimized.

So you'll still end up disassembling the thing to figure out which register to look at. And you might as well do that on the unstripped binary on your development box. For embedded targets at least, that's a small price to pay for a size reduction of that magnitude.