Yes, you can certainly be conservative by ignoring the requirements of the project and throwing away features. It will be a complete failure, because it doesn't do what it is supposed to, but it won't have any dependencies.

I will stop instrumenting my projects because its not needed, no matter what operations says about our SLAs, and my gRPC endpoint will stop talking gRPC because its not needed, and it will be more reliable because clients can no longer talk to it by the expected protocol, and I'll ignore the usability requirements of the CLI and configuration management because specification documents and usability requirements be damned, and I'll implement by own helpers for the database code because NIH syndrome is fantastic, and I'm sure my employer will be happy for me to reinvent the wheel. Except I probably won't have an employer any more, because I seem to have stopped delivering the software they tasked me to.