Is it better to have a lot of content or less content?

I have been hearing two different things recently so I need to know what you all think is better. For a website that wants to rank locally, is it better to have a lot of content or less content? I thought that it was best practice to only keep pages on a site only if they get traffic so that Google keeps your crawl rates high and thinks the site is quality. On the other hand, I have come across a lot of sites that produce tons of content that seem to 1.) not be of much value and 2.) Canabalize other content that the site has, but the site gets a lot of traffic and ranks well. So I ask you all.... In general, for a site that wants to rank locally, does having a bunch of "no value" pages hurt the health of the site and should it be a priority for an SEO to fix their client`s "no value" pages through deletion, redirects, and no-indexing?