Yah, tbh this really smells like an implemented feature that got depriotized on the roadmap. The developers were probably like, “we can make an entry that has it as pending deletion, stop showing it in the UI, and then have a reaping jon that actually deletes all the files.”

Later on, someone says, “Hey, to save on compute, we could just reap when we’re low on space. No need to delete on a cron.”

Then six months later someone says, “Hey, did we ever implement that? It’s high priority.” And someone up top says, “It’s not in the OKRs. Quick; make a chat app so we can shut it down in a year.”