A "deleted" field type deletion is also how you get a massive fine from a GDPR agency when they find out that you're not actually deleting PII properly.
One smaller social media app I used to sysad over actually overwrote data to be purged as xX0-Deleted-oXx and similar (there were a few variants depending on data constraints). There was no "show_deleted_when" garbage.
Then weekly, a task went in and then purged rows with those non-content placeholders to completely purge that user, if a user-purge was requested.
