Soft delete seem like a similar issue to the entity-attribute-value systems that some people build atop relational databases in order to have 'dynamic' tables,

Soft delete seem like a similar issue to the entity-attribute-value systems that some people build atop relational databases in order to have 'dynamic' tables, effectively writing their own database. I'm not sure the ideal solution in either case, but I think software should use the database primitives as they are intended, rather than building their own primitive operations on top. In the case of delete, one idea might be for databases to natively support a recycle bin - shadow tables that contain deleted records, but I'm not a db engineer.