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> we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms

Not really, because every synonym imparts a slightly different meaning, usually perceptable only to native speakers. That's why they persist, because they are useful even if not strictly necessary.

I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.

You can take those 'useless', redundant synonyms from my cold, dead brain cells!