Exposing details of long lived background processes, and especially deletion processes to users (who in many cases couldn't care less) is a lot of work that's probably not worth it for the rare "hey, something went wrong" case — it's usually perfectly acceptable to raise that with the support team and let them use internal tools to debug and investigate.

I am sure there are cases where it is worthwhile, but most of the times I've hit this in common web apps, it wasn't.

I disagree. Any system that doesn't transition an entity to "deleting" is almost certainly going to be a pain point for me when I go to delete something.

This can be seen as related to soft deletes. But I consider it more marking intent in the system. Lets you make "delete" a simple field update that will be carried out by the backend.

Say you are attempting to delete a tweet you made: you click on the delete button, and you want to see that your tweet is in the process of being deleted, but not really deleted yet (as the platform goes and updates all the retweet references and such)?

Really? What value do you as a user get from knowing the details of this transitory state? Do you also want to see a progress bar of how many references have been updated, what's the progress of evicting the tweet from search indexes, etc? What's wrong with all this appearing instantaneous and actual delete happening in the background over 5 minutes or 5 hours?

It seems you are in favour of this approach, just don't want to call it "soft delete" (since it may be followed by a hard out-of-band delete).

I'd rather see acknowledgement that it is having to do more work, than be surprised when it still shows up on another timeline for a bit longer.

I don't necessarily care on a progress bar, as those typically have their own woes.

And don't get me wrong, there are easy deletion cases that I am ok with appearing to happen immediately. I just find hiding processes from me is usually more annoying than it is worth. Worse, when the implementation didn't do it as a process, and now they typically just have more edge cases that won't delete cleanly.

What you missed from my original post is that it is a lot of effort to expose transitory state: nobody is going the extra mile to annoy you, they are just not investing in implementing extra UI to expose it.

And in most cases, it's the right balance.

From my experience, most places don't model the transition state. Such that it easily gets bunged.

If you just want to make it hidden, that is fine. But can lead to it's own problems. Usually when you have uniqueness constraints on things.