That would be a reasonable hypothesis if our information was limited to a few isolated inconsistency issues.

The more posts we see deleted the less likely it is that it's an accident. I just checked and found out that posts from an account that I scrubbed and deleted 5 years ago are popping back up. That stretches "eventual" pretty thin.

We also have a large amount of external information that suggests that reddit is not acting in good faith, much of it from Spez himself.

Between the two of those, malice is more likely than stupidity to be the motivating factor.