And yes, I know they're kept in the reflog. But that is short-lived and (I believe) local rather than eternal and global like everything else in git.
So in the general sense, there's no reason we can't have exactly what's being discussed, but it just doesn't exist yet.
Though it only logs refs that the server itself has seen, which is more or less what I meant by "local". None of its state is shared during push/pull, it's computed entirely based upon what some individual client/server directly observes.
You could tag, but then you are just polluting your tag namespace with old branches.
> ok but then I lose it's nice handle.
Then don't delete the handle? Maybe rename it with a `deleted/` prefix?
It's hard to imagine what the expected behaviour is when branch names are just local convenience labels.