[nemothekid]

>Except apparently not, because the linked article is literally saying it's not supported.

I see your point, but you are mistaken (or you took the wrong impression from the article) - it is supported, you just wouldn't want to do it day-to-day, and for the context of the article it might as well not exist. In Kafka, if you want to forcibly delete the data, you could simply just force topic compaction after a delete. Depending on the size of your data, a regular delete could take hours, which would likely blow the resource usage on any decently sized deployment.

I bring this up because a lot of shiny "BigData" databases use Log Structured Merge Trees, which are immutable and deletes are mostly "soft-deletes" until a "compaction".