Status: IN
Chat and autocomplete use soft delete to preserve structural invariants that physical deletion would break — sequence number contiguity and trie node connectivity — independently of the distributed-resurrection concern that motivates tombstones in replicated systems.
chat keeps deleted messages with `[deleted]` content to preserve sequence numbering; autocomplete zeroes frequency without removing trie nodes to preserve tree structure — both are single-node structural concerns distinct from distributed anti-resurrection
Depends on (SL): chat-soft-delete-preserves-sequence, autocomplete-delete-is-soft