Or said another way -- deletion is dangerous. I've observed that mixing the convenience of automation with the risk of hard deletion is fraught with peril. If you really need automation around deletion, it's best to set up roadblocks and use tombstoning approaches, where archive/backup data is sent to S3 Glacier or something of that ilk. Storage is cheap enough these days that there's no reason not to.

Although the scope is smaller and therefore should be safer, it is still necessary to purge old logs and old backups, etc. in some places.

When I need to do this, I make sure there's a specific /logs or /backups folder where only certain filetypes of a certain modified dates are deleted.

The point of the tooling is that you describe what you want your deploy to look like, and it updates the deploy to match the description. If you delete something from the description and it stays running, that would be very confusing.