Buster's Strange Behaviour Purging Firefox-esr

[Patrick Bartek <patrick.bartek@gmail.com>]

Hi! All --

Installed Buster (netinstall CD, LXDE desktop ONLY, system-utils) in
Virtualbox 6.0 on Stretch (sysvinit as init) host to test and evaluate.
Firefox-esr, of course, installed by default, but after installing
Google Chrome didn't need it anymore, so . . .  When I apt purge
firefox-esr, it was removed and epiphany-browser was installed its
place. ??? Strange. Never had that happen before.  When I purged or
removed epiphany-browser, firefox-esr was reinstalled in ITS place.

If I PINned both not to install, a lot of other files were installed
instead like verious ruby files, zip, vlc, etc. etc.  List is way too
long to post here.

Never, ever had this happen and I purged firefox-esr this way from both
Wheezy and Stretch.  It purged as it should have been with nothing
added.

Anyone got any ideas why this happened?  Or is this a nasty, ol' bug?

B