Yes, this is indeed a (toy) example of the result of a pruning procedure that removed a series of neurons. The new network will never have more neurons, but I don’t think that matters.
The two architectures (old and pruned) are different but “only” from the number of neurons perspective, they maintain the same number, type and order of layers.
To further explain, what I’d like to do is take this pruned tensors and use them to define a network that follows the original architecture but has different tensors shapes. I hope this clears things up.