The "Packages Included" table for each target would seem to supposed to be all of the packages that make up the respective image, but it seems rather to be the included packages _that_were_built_ this exact time, in other words the list is missing the cached packages. Alex writes: "If this happens, this is a bug. Packages Included needs to contain all packages that are in the image, regardless of when the packages were built."
Belen writes: "This is a bit worrying, so I ran a quick test: I rebuilt core-image-minimal with a populated sstate-cache directory (no tasks were executed) and checked the list of packages in the orm_target_installed_package table against the package manifest file. Both contain 29 packages. So it seems to me that the list of packages installed is being populated correctly". David writes: "There may not be an actual defect here. It may just be the unexpected small number of packages that are needed to assemble a core-image-minimal system."
This is normal, the core-image-minimal has just 29 packages.
Verified.