Splitting them off but making them Recommended seems odd to me. At that point we've got all the work of splitting them but little of the benefit, because soft dependencies are included when building images, so our default installs are still going to include pkexec.
Why not just not have them recommended at all, and instead try to find all packages that use them and add dependencies, so that they will be included when an image or whatever really does need them? Is that considered too difficult?
I went with Recommends to be conservative. We could indeed make them fully optional if we end up being confident we will not break the default user experience.
-- Timothée Ravier CoreOS engineer & Fedora Kinoite maintainer