Soft deletes are just the first step. After some period of time you can automatically purge or manually purge. Which is what they’ve supposedly committed to doing.

> except for a formal GDPR right to be forgotten request (or any other compliance situation)

That "any other compliance situation" includes things you probably want to have a soft delete for, like deleting/closing an account. Customers accidentally deleting their accounts, then wanting it restored happens more frequently than one would hope.