According to `texlive.tlpdb`:

name dvips
category TLCore
revision 62387
shortdesc A DVI to PostScript driver
longdesc ...
depend dvips.ARCH

i.e. not dependency on metapost or collection-metapost.

Greppping for metapost/mpost in the dvips package contents also yields no
results.

Removing metapost from the dependencies of dvips is especially beneficial for
the OBS, as metapost has a dependency chain libcairo -> libglvnd -> Mesa-dri ->
libllvm*. This can extend the installed package set significantly.