While I have no official status here, I spend a fair amount of effort on maintenance of questions, editing and such, including changing tags.

But I would like advice on the issue of removing tags under certain circumstances.

For example, I've removed some tags at their first use when they have no tag wiki and I doubt that the tag will be generally useful in the future. This leaves an orphan tag, of course.

I also just removed a tag from a post: failure that had been used once before but in a different way. There was no tag wiki for it and it seemed hard to unify the idea into a proper general classification idea. I removed it from both posts, as it seemed even less relevant to the older post than the new one. For reference, the two questions are:

Failed my 2nd Qualifying Exam in PhD. Absolutely devastated. How to proceed?

and

Should I let a bad mark from 10 years ago discourage me from taking on a TAship?

I usually add what I think are more appropriate tags to such questions (and others).

I'd like some advice on this practice. Does it seem proper? Helpful?

My concern is about meaningless tag proliferation making searching harder, not easier. I also think the threshold for new tags at this point should be fairly high as this site is quite mature. New challenges such as the pandemic are obvious candidates for new tags, of course.

I'm using personal judgements, of course, and they may be open to disagreement.