Exactly this. On our previous software, deleting a user created massive issues (database stability, weird holes in conversations, thanks to a poorly designed custom software package.) The answer was almost invariably no. But if they weren’t super into everything, and only had a few posts, we’d help them out if they were polite and had a good reason (safety, something like that.)
Thankfully we’ve already set that precedent that we don’t delete posts even if you delete the account, so the anonymization option provided by discourse is a much needed change.