I don’t really understand how normal customer deletes could have been delegated to garbage collection while this issue has not been resolved. Looking at my nodes, I already have many TB of garbage on my HDDs now and this is only growing since even normal customer delete operations no longer lead to a regular piece deletion on nodes since the recent change.
I encourage you to keep better track of dependencies. I don’t think that change should have gone live prior to resolving this.
That said, I hope to see this fix go live soon.
Edit: Referring to this: Design draft: fixing deletes and server side copy