Do you have a better solution ?. No one will use the products if it costs some non-trivial amount. And no this thread doesn't represent the billions of non-US non-rich people that use Google.
How can you ever trust anyone like that ? Unless, you see the line of code that is deleting the data ?. It's kind of unfair when people on HN take Apple by their word and for Google "oh is it really deleted though" ?
Don't worry this is part and parcel of HN posts. "If you don't do things the RIGHT way, you must be incompetent". With no regard for one's circumstances or context.
I find this useful for older paradigms where you want an error as well as pass in something to fill in as the output. Instead of doing bool foo(OutFoo* out_foo) or overloading Id getId(); // returns -1 if not present. You could use base::Optional<OutFoo> / base::Optional<Id> in each case respectively.