Comment 6 for bug 1956128

> There is no rule being followed here in terms of sales or production that has anything to do with actual dates, to be clear.

If it were up to me then the rule would be whether OpenGL is supported in the associated Mesa and kernel drivers, for modern desktop support. If you follow that rule then I think you will find:

  xserver-xorg-video-ati: Yes
  All others you mention: No

So the distinction between ATI and those other drivers makes sense to me. But that might not be the reason. If you want to discuss the distinction further then please do so with the Xorg developers at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/issues or the Debian packagers at https://www.debian.org/Bugs/

> There is no reason any package above or ATI should be required instead of recommended

There is a very good reason. xserver-xorg-video-all is a metapackage so it would be a bug for it to ever fail to install some other packages. Hence they are required. If you don't want them then it is the 'xserver-xorg-video-all' package that shouldn't be installed, and it is dependencies on xserver-xorg-video-all that you should be seeking to cut.