I had an account.
I downloaded my data, used a bot to replace all posts with random sentences (Reddit won't let you delete, but you can edit, so this is what you do), then deleted the account. This was a good two or three years ago.
Today I received an email from Reddit telling me my account may be under-age and they will require age verification.
I went to account recovery, entered the username, received an email to reset the password and lo and behold, I was back in my account.
The account was marked as "permanently banned".
I then deleted the account again, with all the procedural and textual paraphernalia of permanent account deletion.
Reddit when they say "delete" they would seem to be misleading users, and changing only the account status.
seattle_spring•3h ago
not so pertinent to your main point, but I've got to say: This is absolutely ruining Reddit, and I sure hope they prevent this from happening sometime soon.
Nothing worse than finally finding the answer some some esoteric question, seeing a thread of "wow, that works perfectly, you're a Godsend!", and then getting to the answer itself and finding something like "Urban walrus clover ocean speaker carpet [this comment has been removed by SomeTool]".