The reason was, I thought, discussed in the article. When you actually fill up your disc, many linux commands will simply fail to run, meaning getting out of t

The reason was, I thought, discussed in the article. When you actually fill up your disc, many linux commands will simply fail to run, meaning getting out of that state is extremely difficult. Deleting the file means you have room to move files around / run emacs / whatever, to fix the problem.