Rackoff's small witness property for the coverability problem is the standard means to prove tight upper bounds in vector addition systems (VAS) and many extensions. We show how to derive the same bounds directly on the computations of the VAS instantiation of the generic backward coverability algorithm. This relies on a dual view of the algorithm using ideal decompositions of downwards-closed sets, which exhibits a key structural invariant in the VAS case. The same reasoning readily generalises to several VAS extensions.