No, the pizza analogy doesn't work. It's the specific use of man here being questioned ("why is it used in a test?"), not man usage in general.
When I am asking: "Whenever I eat pizza in the morning, it tastes metallic to me. Has anyone an idea why that could be?"
I dont want someone to answer: "Why are you eating pizza for breakfast?"
This answer is worth nothing. Actually its even worse, cause answering it costs time.
Of course it doesn't, when your "specific" analogy isn't nearly analogous to the situation.
It is honestly a lot more likely that the reason man is outputting ‘gimme gimme gimme’ at a particular time of day is something to do with your crazy test setup than that it is a feature of man.
So for the pizza analogy, think of it more as ‘pizza sometimes tastes metallic to me when I cook it under the hood of my car’. The car situation seems likely to be relevant. It would be surprising, when someone asks a question like that, to discover that it’s actually because the frozen pizzas they buy when they drive to the parking lot where they then cook them under their car hood actually contain iron filings that were put there deliberately by the manufacturer.
I, for one, am still curious why OP is running a test where they call `man` with no input and fail on different stderr.
If you don't want focus on the details, then don't provide them. If you provide them, it has to be because you think they might be relevant. And then it's relevant for people to ask for further details.
So far you seem to be the only one failing to grasp the original point. Your misunderstanding of the analogy does not transform it into a misrepresentation.