If you have the time to create a “curated onboarding experience that results in progressively more expertise”, yes I agree please do that instead.

I’ve never onboarded to a team that had such an experience, I’ve never heard of a team with something like it consistently, every time I’ve seen it proposed and tried it takes time away from an experienced person (who could have done those same tasks faster) and goes out of date as soon as one new teammate completed the curated set of tasks.

If you can make it durable, my utmost respect!

In the meanwhile, deleting obviously dead code has never failed me as a strategy for myself or a new hire (typically steered by a simple oncall-type task to start the investigation off).

And best part, there is always more to clean up for the next new hire lol.