Correct, this is by design. We used the in-tree pkg base for nearly a year,
and found that the granularity didn't really offer any savings from a
download or time perspective. Updating 100+ packages took far longer than a
single one, due to all the meta operations. Additionally in real-world
usage, we found that base packages tended to all get updated at the same
time, which took far longer via pkg, since it had to go and perform 100+
fetch operations just to download the base system bits.