>I have dealt with the rare "Oops! I deleted important data!" by restoring from backups and it has worked fine.

Usually this goes along with "Oh and the other team did some important work at the same time" so you can't just restore a backup. You either tell them to deal with it or start writing custom scripts to copy out only the data you want to restore.

A more sane solution would be soft delete for x days and after that it becomes a real delete.