you changed the client-side policy to go out to the internet to get updates? that won't change anything with respect to the wsuscontent folder
if you don't need wsus anymore, uninstall the role and then you can delete the folder
if you want to continue using wsus, you can't get rid of the folder but you can maybe clean it up by unselecting the products and categories you no longer want to download in the wsus options
run a cleanup wizard and if that doesn't help much, execute a reset using wsusutil which will purge out the extra data (and re-download the rest)
