I removed this and more earlier while cleaning out undocuented cruft. (I
have not added back module-assistant so far, since it needs build-essential
which would pull in additional dependencies.)
menu (pulled in by desktop tasks),
aptitude (pulled in by debootstap, and may be demoted to optional),
alsa-utils, alsa-base (pulled in by task-desktop),
mdetect, read-edid (no longer used by xorg),
grub (handed by generate_di+k_list),
deborphan, debfoster, localepurge (expert user stuff),
chdrvfont (no such package any more)
* Updated generate_di+k_list to match more closely the current
packages d-i apt-installs.