I read in a Chinese programmer forum that they just mark it as deleted when you delete photos,it seems to be a common practice, not sure about google.
It's not how it works at Google.
This is, hypothetically, possible if they encrypt all data on-disk with a per-data-item key and the key itself is never backed up; if deletion deletes the hot key, the cold backups are now just noise and it doesn't matter if Google deletes them.