Probably their threat model is black hats hacking into an account and requesting a delete.

Once upon a time this issue was resolved by not really ever actually deleting anything - just soft-deleting it and moving it off into an archive somewhere from whence it could be restored... unfortunately not-really-deleted stuff was insanely abused by marketing so that consumers no longer trust it and it's become illegal to retain this information after an account closure in some jurisdictions - so now we can't have nice things.

I'd guess gaming companies have to have more robust processes than most companies. They have to deal with bullying, siblings, sore losers and scammers (people have mentality that it's a game so it's not a real scam).

I don't have any addresses, pictures or names associated with my account that my ID can verify. Plus, if someone deletes my account at this point, they'd be doing me a favor :)

If only we had some sort of bureau of protecting consumers - the tech companies are bad but the people I really want to see fines for bad UI are credit companies. Trying to un-enrolled from once free-of-charge credit reporting is insanely difficult.

That's just it... generally speaking, there's no law against using federal IDs in any way that companies desire. There's also no laws against aggregating data that gives corporations too much information about consumers, and no laws governing how such data can be used, a right to deletion, and other protections.

The laws in the US governing privacy and data use have never been updated for the computer age, because the people who have been in power for the whole computer age generally don't understand computers.