The documentation can't be clearer, it says that newer translators try to be more fault tolerant and is also explicit with counterexamples.

See my last post for according passages.

your problems are

1. that you didn't expect core pod2html to be one of such older translators ... well welcome in the world of a >20 years old open-source project where backwards compatibility dominates.

2. that you want that a tunnel view on a single paragraph already includes the information of a whole man-page.

PS: I'm off!