[culturedsystems]

"Soft deletion isn’t a blanket rule"

That's right, I think it's really "soft deletion as a blanket rule" which is the anti-pattern; soft-deletion is one option which (IMO) is used too often without thinking about specifically what you need to achieve. If soft-deletion is used as a blanket rule, you're more likely to want to try and abstract it away via an ORM or similar, which tends to be fragile (I agree views aren't fragile, but they do add another layer of complexity in defining the relationship between the application logic and the schema). If soft deletion is chosen judiciously and represented explicitly in the business logic, it's less likely to cause problems (the "archived state" in the post is kind of an explicitly represented soft delete).

[wruza]

Yeah, I also think that it should be a part of business requirements rather than a purely technological decision that applies everywhere. A developer shouldn’t be asking “do we need soft deletion” in vacuum, because it’s a decision to be made higher up where workflows live.

It all probably stems from a rule that as a developer you must never [force/allow anyone to] lose expensive input or make it hard to recover. So ORM and platform developers try to ensure that no one really deletes anything, as a presumably simplest solution. It’s okayish sometimes, but is a bad responsibilities design really. If data is valuable, then its owner is the most responsible by definition. So the actual responsibility should be moved there, with explicitness and reasonable safety nets where needed. Otherwise a developer has to get defensive on all fronts which comes with additional costs for both them and a user, for reasons not well defined.