Required Fonts in /System/Library/Fonts/

Mountain Lion (10.8) and earlier

You must never remove Lucida Grande. Without that font, the system will not boot. If you remove it while the system is active, you will lose control of all menus, essentially locking you out of your Mac.

Mavericks (10.9)
Mavericks utilized a different method to protect access to the desktop. If You remove Lucida Grande, it would still make your system inoperable. What Mavericks does differently as a form of font protection is to use the first available system font for the menus.

Yosemite (10.10)
In Yosemite, Lucida Grande is no longer the main system font, and HelveticaNeueDeskInterface.ttc is the font you cannot remove for any reason.

El Capitan (10.11) & Sierra (10.12)
El Capitan and Sierra change things again with the introduction of an all new set of system fonts. For the Finder Items to work You will need:

• San Francisco
• HelveticaNeueDeskInterface.ttc
• LucidaGrande.ttc

Excerpt from Kurt Langs Font Management in macOS and OS X