I am researching the behavior of halt on various Linux distros. They
seem to be inconsistent.

halt has different man pages:

In ascii:
"
AUTHOR
        Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@???
"

At https://linux.die.net/man/8/halt

"
Author
Written by Scott James Remnant <scott@???>
"

Does anyone have any insight on this?

Simon