I don't think this needs a reprex because a quick look at the code path here will confirm this is true:
https://github.com/rstudio/renv/blob/master/R/init.R#L94
This seems at odds with the description of bare which says:
bare Boolean; initialize the project without attempting to discover and install R package dependencies?
Discovery is currently being performed which has a couple of unfortunate side effects:
renv initialisation is slow for the case where you want to manually limit the dependency search scope
renv can choke parsing files that don't need to be parsed causing unexpected errors (how I discovered this problem, new issue will be created)