If the end goal is to improve privacy, not collecting and storing the data seems a much stronger protection than crossing your fingers hoping someone doesn't go rummaging around looking for personal data.
GDPR's goal was to make PII into "toxic materiel", to be only handled if you really, really need it and are willing to deal with the toxicity.
Having a pool of toxic sludge and declaring everything is fine because you do not use it after filtering what was useful for you does not stop it from being a dangerous pool of toxic sludge.
If you delete any data that can single out people when you're ingesting it, then nothing more needs to be done. So you delete any user identifying data by default, not keep it from the very start, unless you have a very strong use case. You can also have completely anonymised but still useful data. There are many statistical methods to collect useful but reasonably and provably anonymous data like differential privacy.
If the businesses that give you data don't provide the option of completely deleting it then they are non-compliant as well.
...and then presumably deleting it, as required by the law if there is no business or technical reason for having the personal data. That seems like a pretty good pro-privacy move, vs leaving that data hanging around forever.