I’m a little surprised they let me delete my account after they permabanned me, and that deleting my account deleted all of my 18 years-worth of posts and comments (and not just my username/profile). All that data they want to train their bots on, gone (at least publicly, anyway).
I would imagine that your records are flagged as deleted in a DB, but they are still being used to train models for those that are paying.
It does at least stop bots from scraping, but at that point, I'd almost rather have bots scrape just to create more overhead for Reddit and to lessen the value for the people paying for premium access.