At least one benefit of doing something like this isn't necessarily that you automatically gain better security by removing stuff you don't need, but you instead remove security scanning positives tripped by finding CVEs in packages you're not using. Not having your developers slog through justifying all of them to see if they're false positives or not to release to production means they can get back to doing their actual jobs.

And, it's important to remember that when an attacker does gain a foothold, often the very first thing they're going to do is run a scan of every single binary on your system to see if there is anything they can use to escalate privilege, so having these around does present a true risk even if your program never calls out to any of them.