When "delete" actually means "hide from my view", you can only hope that you live in a country with strong privacy and data protection laws.
IMO hard deleting things is generally a bad practice until the user wants to delete their entire account or some other very explicit action is executed.
I expect that the big tech companies have all kinds of cold storage backups and no one is going to actually go spelunking in those archives to physically delete my data when I delete an email. It's more likely that they will delete the keys to decrypt it, but even the keys must be safely stored somewhere, so it's the same problem just with less data.
I do, but presumably that doesn’t matter, as the US thinks its legal code outweighs the legal code for Europeans living in Europe. Jokes on Europeans for allowing Americans to take over the world stage for too long, I suppose.