+1

FWIW, the original rationale behind leaving them was because I didn't want translators to delete a load of work only to have to redo it.
I've since found that's not how KDE translation works, they get moved to comments in the end of the .pot file - for code restoring from git is super easy should anyone ever want to

I just saw that 5.12 beta tarballs have all the po files for all the dead applets, runners etc, because of the packaging tools just doing magic stuff (possibly based on Messages.sh content), ignoring any skipped subdirs in the actual buildsystem.

5.12 being an LTS, perhaps it might make sense to do the wiping even earlier and before the 5.12.0 tagging, so that the officially released source code tarballs are clean from all the dead code and all the useless po files for the dead code from the very first real release.

So what about doing the wiping already next Tuesday, Jan 30, two days before tarball creation?
Will see to be around at tomorrow's Plasma hangout and ask there, for some direct Plasma team input/approval.