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I've seen a few projects across different organizations where an old dev was bad at copying and pasting code and ignored DRY principles. The projects had almost no refactoring, and the primary goal of a new dev was cleaning up the redundancy to better map things out for better organization of the codebase.

> In your career, how often have you seen good software engineers whose main contribution was deleting code ?

Depends on the size and age of the company. In a startup, approximately never since the job is to build something out of nothing.

In a large enterprise with decades of codebase history to be optimized, very frequently.

Yes, I have had to clean up a 300,000 LOC codebase and my primary contribution was deleting old code and reusing code we already had

I did say I wrote 30 lines of code, which was reusing other code instead of copy-pasting and changing a few things