Removing code is awesome and makes me happy. Sometimes it's hard to know for certain if it's OK to remove, but that illustrates the point.

BTW I like to remove my own code too, assuming it's become obsolete or replaced. My joy in having a clean and performant present-day product trumps any feelings about past efforts and old code.

From context it seemed that the kind of code we're talking about obviously served no real purpose. Most codebases where everyone is afraid to delete anything are unmanageable messes only comprehensible to people who have been working on them for years.

We have invented that really useful thing named version control to know about the history of code.

If yours has commit messages not good enough to properly understand its history, fix that.