Após solucionar problemas e discutir o assunto com Bob no Chat de Acesso à Raiz , descobrimos que, de fato, env_keep possui valores padrão não documentados.
Extraia do manpage do sudo:
-V The -V (version) option causes sudo to print its version string and the ver‐ sion string of the security policy plugin and any I/O plugins. If the invok‐ ing user is already root the -V option will display the arguments passed to configure when sudo was built and plugins may display more verbose informa‐ tion such as default options.
user@host $: sudo sudo -V : [...] Environment variables to preserve: XAUTHORIZATION XAUTHORITY TZ PS2 PS1 PATH LS_COLORS KRB5CCNAME HOSTNAME HOME DISPLAY COLORS [...]
Se você definir env_keep sem anexá-lo, ele substituirá esses valores. Então use Defaults env_keep +="values"