Simply awesome and great work! You are a magician I must admit 
Any particular reason the image is even smaller than the ones I created with 19.07.x and all suggested package removals? Shouldn't a 21.02.x image be bigger already because of the kernel? 
Is it because all this optimizations here:
It's awesome because it's like 250k smaller means it should be a ease to include some packages with image builder directly 
Thank's a million for taking time pushing the good old ralinks on another level 