Not sure what kind of company they work for, but if it is a legitimate business with real customers then higher ups should be horrified that a developer is rand

Not sure what kind of company they work for, but if it is a legitimate business with real customers then higher ups should be horrified that a developer is randomly deleting in-use production features under the guise of "code cleanup". Whether it is accessed by 50% or 0.5% of users is irrelevant. That is not a measure of how important something is in the codebase or the product. We have a data export form on our website (which is a requirement under GDPR and several other similar regulations) that has been used by under 0.01% of users throughout its existence. If a new hire decided to "clean it up" without approval and then bragged about how many lines of code they were able to reduce...