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It would generally be unwise to start playing in there without being certain of what you are doing. ~/Library is where all your apps store their prefs, how you want them to work for you. However, with it being a somewhat loaded dev machine, I was surprised to find that the system was surprisingly tolerant of the complete removal of ~/Library. In my case the user account was not valued and the machine was pending complete format. I understand that this could be a hugely risky move depending on what applications are installed and your level of comfort with losing data/time. After all settings were back in place, a df -h showed that I reclaimed about 16GB. The system survived and is still running great. Upon boot I had to log back into iCloud, set up Slack, set preferences on keyboard, trackpad, terminal, browser, programs, etc. I didn't expect that the system would return to an operational state. Having planned on performing a fresh install anyway, I further experimented by rming the entire ~/Library directory and rebooting. I began experimenting with ~/Library to reduce bloat on a system where HDD space was running low. While developing BLE applications on 10.11.x versions of Mac OS, I often found that I had to clear BLE data from ~/Library in order to return to a pre-connected/paired state on server (not client) devices. This question is a bit old now, but I figured I'd add my experience for googling.
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