Hello,
Turns out that dir is highly variable, and judging from the name, also disposable.
In my case it was responsible for about 20 GB of churn over a month, i.e. it took 25 GB to keep incremental backups of two Tor nodes with only 2 GB each in root FS (and I was wondering what's going on with my backup location's free space...)
Dear Tor project: this is very bad style to keep that in /var/lib, content with properties like this must go into /var/cache/ [1], where it would be automatically excluded from backups by default policies in most backup systems.
[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARCACHEAPPLICATIONCACHEDATA