Soft deletion by storing the row in JSON won’t survive months of schema migrations. If restoring a record is rare you don’t want to have to find out that there’s no way to map the old data to the new table when it matters.

There are cases where you shouldn’t be deleting or updating data; auditable and non-repudiation systems for some regulatory compliance come to mind. Best to use patterns that don’t require those operations.

Soft deletion does come at a cost. Choose carefully!