In my opinion and interpretation of the rules, yes.
I think the clause as written and the various commentary examples support this interpretation.
With any highly pathological rules beasts, there is ultimately the gold standard of how it would actually be judged by Japanese Go association officials, if it had somehow occurred in a real professional game. However, I think the Nihon Ki-in are somewhat constrained and they would have to create some sort of special new interpretation of this enabling concept to handle this case, if they were to rule that the position is dead.
A hairy aspect of this sort of rule and interpretation is that it allows the embedding all sort of arbitrary and intractable life/death questions into the considerations of hypothetical play (however, I guess, broadly speaking, that is already the case with respect all sorts of other rules beasts one could construct to test the limits of life/death determination via ideal hypothetical play).
The example given the original post has most of the board being cleared by the hypothetical capture, and I think it is fairly “obvious” and would be widely accepted that White is in fact able to establish a living group in the new space.
However, one could make the vacated space take an arbitrary size and shape. For example, one could have the shape game as the position hypothetically left behind after the White stones have been hypothetically captured:
Thus, the question of whether the White stones are alive boils down to answering whether or not White could create a living group in the shape game.
Or imagine that the space vacated is a N-by-N square in the corner, surrounded by unconditionally alive Black stones. It’s not clear what size N needs to be to say that White could hypothetically live with an invasion.
See: When is 3-3 alive?