I don't have a dev machine handy to check this, however:
* I seem to recall that we package 'more' not 'less' (presumably for space reasons)
* I'm not sure about rsync errors, I would need to see the failing output.

we ship less in dev/test images.  more is in the rootfs.

as discussed in hangouts, less/rsync/etc... are just symptoms.  the underlying issue is that /usr/local is empty.  the stateful was either not copied over or was wiped for some reason.

have to figure out why that happened.  or just try a newer version and if it works, don't worry about it.

Unfortunately we haven't rev'd the version yet. We're still at R63-9916.0.0.

you downloaded the test image by hand.  you can manually pick a newer version.  the CrOS pinned version in the chromium tree is irrelevant here.

9937 has /usr/local and so far looks good.

Reporting the same on eve, on an old build (9611.0.0).
Claims to be a test image, but I have password-less root login, and /usr/local/bin doesn't exist. This image was functional before, this should be disk/image corruption.

In another instance (eve, different device, also 9611.0.0), it claims to be a test image, has passwordless root access, /usr/local/bin exists and is populated but test-image specific binaries (python etc) are missing. 

FWIW I was on a pixel1.

might be related to  issue 760007 

760007 mentions Lenovo devices. I was on a Pixel1.

76007 mentions multiple devices, not just lenovo