We did an experiment. We decided to delete less important pages on a website to see if it would help other pages to get a higher PageRank. It was a mistake. We saw that the google juice of this particular website went down after sometimes. This means that the important pages didn’t rank as well as before. We think that all the web pages benefit from a residual google juice coming from other unpopular web pages.
For sure, it is ok to delete pages when it is necessary. However, there are other options. For example, it is good to modify the content of the page. For instance, if there was a copyright violation rather than deleting the page, it would be good to show an error page saying that the content of the page violated a copyright. This page can return a 200 error code rather than a 404 (not found). If a person left a company and a profile on the company’s website, it is better to modify the content saying that this person worked at the company between XXX and XXX. You can mention this person does not work anymore at the company. If you discontinued a product or a service, it is better to explain that this product or service is discontinued.
If a page receives few visits every day, it is not a reason to delete this unpopular page. This would be worth it to look into google search console and understand why the said page performs bad. Then, change the title or the content to give this page a second chance.