Sure, depends on what you want to do, that’s just the command I used to purge unverified accounts. My instance doesn’t really have any users so not a big deal.
Yeah, unless you are deleting hundreds of users you can’t really tell, but I deleted 6k+ bots and can confirm user count automatically updates.
For large instances pictures is probably the bigger consumer of space, but for small instances the database size is the bigger issue because of federation. Also, mass storage for media is cheap, fast storage for databases is not. With my host I can get 1TB of object storage for $5 a month. Attached NVMe storage is $1 per month per 10 GB.
For my small instance the database is almost 4x as large as pictrs, and growing fast.