Duplicate rpmdb in /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm-ostree-base-db

The rpmdb is stored at /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/rpmdb.sqlite and/or /usr/share/rpm/rpmdb.sqlite (currently one of these is a symlink to the other), and these paths are identified as belonging to the rpm package. However, in the Fedora bootc images, there's an extra copy of the rpmdb located at /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm-ostree-base-db/rpmdb.sqlite; this appears to be a hardlink to the same inode as the rpmdb file in the normal location, but it's not identified as belonging to any RPM package.

Additionally, when an image based on a Fedora bootc image is rechunked using build-chunked-oci, this ends up being turned into an entirely separate (and presumably extraneous) copy of the rpmdb, rather than remaining as a hardlink. Since it's not owned by any package, it gets put in the "rpmostree-unpackaged-content" layer, unnecessarily increasing the size of a layer that typically has to get re-downloaded with every update.

Can this extra rpmdb in /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm-ostree-base-db simply be removed, or is it still needed for something?