I understand the intent behind the rule and the goal for the rule; but this is why we have elected moderators. Having a one-size fits all rule is heavy-handed, and this should be resolved through the existing means we have.
No one should have adverse action taken against them for using the affordances of the site. The site should be fixed if the affordances have bad effects.
I will submit that Stack Overflow should handle this through software; but until they do, Elected Moderators are the 'human exception handler' whose job it is to handle these issues.
Those, as they say, are the breaks.
I'm not an elected moderator, so I can't tell you what to do here; but I can say that if I were an elected moderator, this is how I would handle it:
- We already have policies around deletion of duplicates; we should continue to follow those policies
- Default to keeping content from being deleted when it doesn't fall under the above
- If it falls under one of our close reasons, fine, close it
- lock when necessary as a cooldown for a short time, and encourage delete participants to take their energy to meta, instead of taking the easy way out and clicking a button to delete
Until we have software that can moderate this; it's up to our community elected moderators to handle these situations. No one is being helped by moderators standing on the sidelines for these issues.