I feel you are describing an implementation that was once fine but is no longer satisfactory, rather than an abstraction, which perhaps could have been made eas

I feel you are describing an implementation that was once fine but is no longer satisfactory, rather than an abstraction, which perhaps could have been made easier to fix with a bit more abstraction: a function to do the soft deletion if possible, with a better-performing (albeit probably more complex) way of determining whether soft deletion was an option.