I agree that people who say "more honest internet" are usually trying to make a virtue of necessity; but its not entirely untrue.

Re-writing one's posts to make replies look off-target / ridiculous was a common enough forum tactic in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Forums would often set posts immutable after a few minutes to limit this.

On balance I think clients and relays should honour deletion requests, but self-doxxing and foot-gunning will remain major risks whatever we do. 

"The bad people" can easily store everyone / everything of interest to them and ignore deletion requests. 

 Clients like forums can put a comment 'this reply was made before the original post was edited'  so not really an issue. 

 Which Nostr clients do that, again? Its not really an issue once they all do 

 None as far as I know.  But I see no reason this couldn't be implemented once we have edit/deletes using timestamps. 

 The delete removes things from relays, so while clients need to trigger the delete request, it’s the relay that honors it.

You can use nos.social to delete content, but you can also just use this web app: https://nostr-delete.vercel.app/