Yeah, but ignoring the delete requests, and storing the data puts them out of compliance with European and American deletion and retention laws. And if they were lying, and were using user photos to train models, they have more than enough non-deleted photos already.
I’m not pulling out my jump to conclusions mat quire yet. The database corruption issue sounds more reasonable. That stuff happens, and Apple isn’t zeroing data. Most people aren’t. Because the data isn’t zeroed, a file can resurrect when a corruption issue is remedied.