Near the bottom, this article says the exact opposite of its headline - that Reddit is restoring deleted data, even if it should be legally deleted. ☹️
TLDR reddit might not be restoring data that the user deleted, but there are some funky cases where it's easy to miss stuff when deleting manually. Which is exactly why Update #1 is so bad - it's basically impossible to delete everything without reddit's help.
I know for a fact that (so far) one post and at least one comment (there may be more, I'm still going through) have been restored. How do I know this? Because every single post and comment I deleted, I edited with "DELETED - GDPR" first and then deleted. I did all this systematically. I knew that if I saw any post or comment with that text, it would mean it had been restored. And now, today, a few days after that post and comment were edited and then deleted, they're back with the edited text. This is also well with that 1000 post comment/limit too.
This time I've taken screenshot first and deleted again. I've also recorded video of me editing and deleting a comment. If that one comes back as well, I have proof.
All my edit/deletes have been over several days so it's not like I'm hammering the servers and causing them to glitch out on deleting correctly (I fully refresh the page after anyway to check deletions have indeed happened).
I found another post and multiple comments undeleted today. I'm now appending periods . to every post and comment that comes back so I'll be able to count how many times I've had to delete the same comment.
e.g. If I see DELETED - GDPR . . I know that comment has been restored three times.
Ridiculous that I have to delete over and over again.
Very smart! In a way this is good news. It suggests that editing to overwrite is effective - you aren't seeing your old content restored, but the edited version. Agree with the ridiculousness of having to delete again and again.