I imagine the answer's ~yes from the perspective of something you build and deploy (and I agree it's relevant to the article--but I'll caveat that I read xamuel to be asking the question very broadly).

Relying on a post-build process to avoid deploying unused code and dependencies still exposes you to a subset of problems with most if not all of the dependency graph.

Sufficiently-rich correct-by-definition metadata on the internal and external dependencies of each package might let you prune some branches without requiring the dependency to be present, but in the broad there are a lot of cases where that can't really help?