It's surprising but the EU tends to be one of the most stringent regions to work in both when it comes to totally permanently deleting things and when it comes

It's surprising but the EU tends to be one of the most stringent regions to work in both when it comes to totally permanently deleting things and when it comes to never ever deleting things - as with anything like this where there is a debate (rather than a settled best practice) there are some times when soft deletion is appropriate and necessary (i.e. to adhere to log retention requirements common in the EU) and some times when it's unnecessary... and the occasional fun time when it's both necessary to support soft deletes and hard deletes - when logs need to be retained for auditing purposes but also when some users can force a hard delete (leading to that data either being purged or moved to an archive storage if it's still needed for auditing purposes). The world is almost never as simple as it seems.