Not a traditionalist by any sense of the word but ironically, a modern profession like writing software(especially making sense of legacy code), has taught me to empathise with traditions

You may not see the value in certain piece of code but don’t just remove it if you don’t know why it was there in the first place.

If you have time, invest it in going to the root of it, discover the original intention of having it there. Was it a mistake? was it done due to lack of proper knowledge then? or have we discovered something new since then that makes the code irrelevant today..

Now you can argue for or against it.

Yes, we should always strive to remove dead code, because less code means easy to maintain, easy to add new features, but we need to be extra careful in identifying what is a dead code.