Comment 8 for bug 1960089

@phd The /boot/efi partition size of 512MiB is far larger than most people need, but it does cover almost all potential use cases included dual boot. If that partition gets corrupted or filled, it could prevent boot of any OS on that disk. For this reason, I believe the team went with the sensible choice and kept that size to prevent this catastrophic, and for many people, unrecoverable error.

There are certainly other reasons why /boot/efi is separate. As you mentioned, symlinks are lost, and I speculate that might necessitate full copies of initrd.img, for example, which would completely negate any space savings from combining the two. And of course, if you do that and load up too many kernels, the /boot/efi partition can get corrupted, which is even worse than an overfull boot partition.

I certainly support your proposal to have the user specify a /boot partition size during FDE install, preferable from a list. Customers who run development, AI, and content-creation workstations definitely need a larger boot allocation, whereas Raspberry Pi hobbyists are probably fine with the default, although I wonder how many of the latter actually need or use LVM or FDE (LVM+LUKS).