Yes, they are typically very small. The general exception to this rule is if logs are stored in pg_log. I recommend storing logs out of the PGDATA dir as they can be quite large and don't really make sense to restore to another server.
Files copied from the master will be marked as such in backup.manifest (master:true) so you can check for yourself.
Good to know. And fortunately for this DB we do have pg_log (and pg_xlog) symlinked to different volumes outside of $PGDATA.
> I did come up with a sort of Rube Goldberg-esque workaround for now > involving using a clone of the prod standby VM from Veeam backup to use > as the backup source (after stopping recovery and opening it as a > standalone DB).
You don't get PITR that way, of course, but at least it's a backup. As long as your clone is consistent.
Yes it's a crash-consistent snapshot-based backup. I've done quite a few restores from it and it works great. It can do PITR as well since I would have all the WAL files from prod needed to keep recovering. But for these cases I just recover it to the first consistent point and open it for testing (or backups in this case).