Exceptions for slander and copyrighted information (e.g. photos) that were posted by other users? (or even regular content posted by the user that they 100% own) Absolutely -- but even in these cases, requiring that the third-party platform owners track down all potentially offensive content (much of which may be posted by other users) and then purge every layer of their backups after removing the offending content is overkill and shifts the responsibility away from the offender (whoever posted the content, even if it was the user himself) to the platform owner.
Ultimately, the ability to un-publish content you own that you published should be sufficient regulation-wise, and most popular platforms already enable that as a basic feature.
It's not about undoing participation in information sharing. GPDR does not require Wikipedia to delete everything I've contributed, but the fact that I have contributed is subject to be deleted if I request so. Furthermore, there must be explicit opt-in, and that is a good thing.
It's a trivial problem to purge from the backup, really. It's not a hard problem to solve. Many companies have done so before, and now we might even see standard tools to do so.
> only the people who opted to be forgotten benefit
That is not true. One of the main points of GDPR is that you only store data as long as it is reasonable for your business. If I haven't been a customer at a store for 5 years, I can fully expect that my data has been deleted. How long reasonable is will be determined in the court, but I expect it is going to be in the customers favor.