Why go against your engineer's recommendation?
Would this cause software issues (looking for a location that no longer exists) - even for caching purposes?
Why do it manually (with a knife to lift a floor tile)? Servers can be removed easily with a little physical labor — unplug cables, remove from rack, done; especially if you don't care about what they are running or doing — just push the power button and go.
Why cut wires? Yeah, that doesn't make much sense.

How many servers are we talking about? A few servers? A rack? A row? An entire data center? Does this includes top of rack switches/(redundant power)? Get the DC operations guys out there to help you. For a group of servers this is a physical job.

While the gist of the story may be true, it seems to be lacking pertinent details.

My two cents.