I can't find the original post now, but there's a good suggestion that booleans should usually be timestamps:

UPDATE orders SET deletion_timestamp = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() WHERE deletion_timestamp IS NULL

Even in a system where you don't completely delete deleted records, you may move them to a new table, eg thing_deleted in certain situations (this is a real pattern I've encountered with justified reasons where merely setting delete_at would be insufficient for business logic reasons), which tends to be an INSERT and a DELETE in a transaction

Some laws require a hard delete. But I agree, soft delete is much less risky

Right, but as I had no way to understand which orders should be ‘hidden’ and which don’t, from the systems side it was the same as if I hard deleted everything.

> does anyone DELETE things now a days?

Yes. OLTPs work best when cold data is hard deleted from the hot instances. Backups and OLAP can keep things for longer, as needed. GDPR, right to be forgotten, and similar regulations may require deleting even scrubbed copies. (IANAL)

Only for some tables. Depends on the usage.