> Just tokenizing based on a few common characteristics (brace pairing, quotes, indentation, newlines, etc.) should let you trim a ton without knowing anything about the language, I imagine?

Yep, here's an explanation from a related tool, which was spawned by the parser-parser-combinator[0] approach to syntactical analysis and transformation: https://comby.dev/blog/2021/03/26/comby-reducer - which is based on what you've said.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMZLBB_BFNg