So, yes, it would be unrealistic to suggest AMD could rip out the NPU and easily put that space to good use in this current chip.

a few amd chips did have the NPU removed in them, except they were mostly allocated to handheld gaming devices. the Ryzen Z1E for example.

when redreshed, there were a handful of hawkpoint cpus that were NPU less (Ryzen 7 8745HS)

Strix point does not have that dumped die cycle yet