Of course, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can e.g. keep your deleted crap in the main table (which makes certain things easier) and then hard-delete or archive it to another table after N days.
And several of these "columns" were actually JSON blobs that probably should've been in their own table. But what do I know. I left!
Once you have an existing tirefire, it's a matter of damage control and "what is the least bad way to accomplish new functionality?" and the answer to that will always be unique for each unique tirefire.