So, it turns out that this change is highly problematic for a community I’m in. In terms of our policy and prior commitments of the organization to its members, well, it’s just a violation of previous promises.
It’s a private organization’s Discourse; no public sign-ups are allowed. We have no issues with spammers, and we have an active Moderation team with formal rules. Our internal agreements at the time of the move to Discourse were based on the fact that flags and Moderators may cause posts to be hidden, but that no posts are deleted or made completely inaccessible (which some viewed as censorship.) Our Discourse is set that hidden posts never get auto-deleted.
It’s somewhat unavoidable that we roll back if there’s no option to control this unexpected change in behavior.
Is there any chance of this becoming something that can be toggled in a setting? Otherwise, we’re going to have to look at manually editing the code we run (self-hosted), something which we’d much rather not start doing, but which is much better than moving away from Discourse or stopping all updates.