The min-content in CSS grid apparently takes into account the full width of a <pre> element content, even if you put max-width: 100%; on it. Because the min of minmax() wins, if you use min-content as the minimum value of a grid-template-columns column, it will go as wide as the <pre> content regardless of the max value set. Also note that the column width value auto behaves like minmax(min-content, max-content), and thus suffers the same problem.
In my case, going with a small fixed width, eg minmax(6em, 50em) did basically what I wanted.