The thing is, affected persons can not only request a data deletion, but also the pausing of data processing. In that case, you are not allowed to delete them b

The thing is, affected persons can not only request a data deletion, but also the pausing of data processing. In that case, you are not allowed to delete them but they must not be used any longer, which is essentially a soft delete. So to be compliant, you’d have to implement both a soft and a hard delete.