But, just like this article using «physically deleted», when in practice it's not the case (the bits are just freed to be overwritten some unknown amounts of time later), does legal compliance just completely ignores this fact of actual physical deletion ??*

(AFAIK it takes several passes of overwriting bits with random bits on magneto-mechanical storage to not be able to retrieve any significant fragments of the original data, and things are even worse on transistor storage, which casually makes copies of the data for wear leveling reasons.)

*With the exception of state secrets of course, where we know that storage is mechanically destroyed «with extreme prejudice».