Yes, but a lot of devices don't support getting root access, or come with caveats from doing so (I remember at least on Sony devices in the past, doing so permanently erased the proprietary camera blobs which resulted in forever low quality pictures).
That being said, you can disable system apps in Android (with exceptions, can't disable SystemUI obviously) which is about as good as deleting them. Since they're on the system partition which is separate from the user data partition, it doesn't actually grant you any usable free space anyways AFAIK.
Eh, if you have root access, you can move things back and forth to the system partition if you want to make different use of the space. Not that that's a good idea, but you can do it. You'd be better off going the custom rom route if you need the space that much. Or it used to be better; no idea if the current options for roms actually do it the same.