Yes an no.
We have very good reasons for restricting the deactivation/deletion of a user that is a project lead. In particular, the lead is normally the default assignee for the project and may have special project administration permissions that other users do not have. Allowing that user to be removed without first assigning a new lead for the project could leave it in a state where nobody can use the project until an administrator makes this additional change, and they may not even realize that there is a problem at the time. Preventing the user from being removed until after this has been addressed in turn prevents a problem with using JIRA.
Component leads are a similar story. You are not prevented from deleting a component lead; you just get a warning message that they will be removed from that role, resulting in the project lead taking over their responsibilities.
You definitely should not be bypassing JIRA and using the embedded crowd DirectoryManager directly. I think JIRA is sufficiently hardened against problems with these users that it won't break anything to do so, but service methods on UserUtil that look for these things and tell you that you need to deal with them before deleting or deactivating the user are there to help you keep JIRA running smoothly. The more you circumvent the checks that we clearly expect to be effective, the more chances there are that you'll create an unexpected problem that we didn't anticipate. Instead, you should first update the project/component lead to a user who can take over those responsibilities, just like it tells you that you should.
Short answer: Yes, I think it would work. Don't do it, anyway.
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