I don't think 'man' is that commonly used in scripts or as part of other automated processes that could go wrong. Most other unix utilities are fairly commonly used that way and a small behavioural change could be expected to break something somewhere just due to the sheer volume of use.

I'm not actually that surprised the easter egg broke something for someone even in 'man', for the exact same reason, but it's probably less expected than with grep and lots of other unix utilities.