I've fortunately never had to do this job on either of our Aveos, so I can't offer any first-hand information. And I also can't recall ever seeing another Aveo forum thread on this subject either. The FSM says to remove the dash, but I've always felt that manual is very weak (compared to other FSMs), and IMO has very poor visuals which often are difficult to correlate to reality.

So I'd advise to just follow your gut feel and remove stuff only when you need to. I've had instances with other vehicles of being able to do a job with far less effort than what was specified in the doc. And a lot of that depends on how much you're willing and able to contort your body to do 'non-standard' access. Good luck with it!