Are the WordPress Core CSS styles really all nessesary?

On WordPress Codex there are these CSS styles listed. It’s a quite big list of styles, but it seems they are doubled unnecessary.

It says:

Each Theme should have these or similar styles in its style.css file
to be able to display images and captions properly. The exact HTML
elements and class and ID values will depend on the structure of the
Theme you are using

Does this mean all these styles should be in a theme?

What’s the reason for this specificity for the align styles that are already declared? By looking at this, it seems it could be reduced drastically.

What are the disadvantages in reducing this to a minimum?

/* =WordPress Core from http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS#WordPress_Generated_Classes
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

.alignnone {
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
    display: block;
    margin: 5px auto 5px auto;
}

.alignright {
    float:right;
    margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}

.alignleft {
    float: left;
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

.aligncenter {
    display: block;
    margin: 5px auto 5px auto;
}

a img.alignright {
    float: right;
    margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}

a img.alignnone {
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

a img.alignleft {
    float: left;
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

a img.aligncenter {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto
}

.wp-caption {
    background: #fff;
    border: 1px solid #f0f0f0;
    max-width: 96%; /* Image does not overflow the content area */
    padding: 5px 3px 10px;
    text-align: center;
}

.wp-caption.alignnone {
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

.wp-caption.alignleft {
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}

.wp-caption.alignright {
    margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}

.wp-caption img {
    border: 0 none;
    height: auto;
    margin: 0;
    max-width: 98.5%;
    padding: 0;
    width: auto;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
    font-size: 11px;
    line-height: 17px;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 4px 5px;
}