field theory - Do the equations of motion simply tell us which degrees of freedom are superfluous?

A massless spin $1$ particle in 4D has 2 degrees of freedom. However, we usually describe it using four-vectors, which have four components. Hence, somehow we must get rid of the superfluous degrees of freedom. This job is done by the Maxwell equations. To quote from Gilmore's "Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry"

“In some sense, Maxwell's equations were a historical accident. Had the discovery of quantum mechanics preceded the unification of electricity and magnetism, Maxwell's equations might not have loomed so large in the history physics. … Since the quantum description has only two independent components associated with each four momentum, there are four dimensions worth of linear combinations of the classical field components that do not describe physically allowed states, for each four momentum. Some mechanism must be derived for annihilating these superpositions. This mechanism is the set of equations discovered by Maxwell. In this sense, Maxwell's equations are an expression of our ignorance.”

Is there an analogous interpretation for the Dirac equation and possibly other equations of motion?