[tgbugs]

Hard deletes are also awful from the perspective of data preservation. For example, when youtube removes a video they also delete all the metadata or any indication that it ever existed. Countless people have lost what they thought was a secure record of at least the title of songs or videos they saved to a playlist.

There is also a more sinister side, which is that the ability to hard delete something forever means that bad actors can fabricate old "deleted" documents and accuse someone of having created and then deleted them.

[alexpetralia]

I do think that hard deletes may sometimes be required to comply with legal requirements (e.g. complete expungement of personal information relating to a user). If it is not required by statutory law, sometimes it is written into commercial contracts.

[bulhi]

Exactly. I get OP's point (i.e. you can accidentally include softdeleted records in your results), but for some types of data hard deletes are an absolute no-go anyways, so you just have to live with it.