Your proposed process is exactly the wrong way around. You'll end up keeping dead code just because it has tests, and delete code that's still used in prod just

Your proposed process is exactly the wrong way around. You'll end up keeping dead code just because it has tests, and delete code that's still used in prod just because it happened to be untested. This is one of the details that the blog post goes into. Sounds like it's not as trivial and obvious a problem as you think it is, and you would have benefited from just not dismissing the post because of that.