[chuckadams]

> Overloading deleted_at to have a semantic meaning for an active account is just fundamentally bad design.

Then don't do that. It's kind of a leap to say soft deletes are categorically bad because someone might confuse "deleted" with "inactive". My users table does the super-advanced thing of having both columns. The ORM also doesn't forget to add the not-null criterion. There's also zero databases in active use where it poses a problem to indexing.

Soft deletes suck in their own way, but none of the alternatives are perfect either.