The apk-tools 3.0.0 stable version was just tagged a couple hours ago. This first production release of 3.0 will include some further shrinkage work on top of the RCs that we've been using, on top of the metadata (scripts.tar) reductions reported above.
Release - https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/apk-tools/-/commit/9de54a44947b8bbf6b746c9c67bc2e18e4002f3c
Minimal applets - https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/apk-tools/-/commit/88fe94b11b134759ff1238e7f65c60b793bc1532
Compressed help always - https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/apk-tools/-/commit/819f999ab2c24c6d05cf2bcdb2ec96abe863bb46
The "minimal applets" version, which I'm pretty sure will be the default for OpenWrt's on-device version (the host version will need all the applets), removes a handful of tools that are generally unused on a production device as they deal with creation of packages and indexes.
adbgenadbsignconvdbconvndxdotindexmkndx