Hi @geriatricguy,
To clarify, deleting an item places in that "Recently Deleted" section, from which it can be recovered for 30 days. Deleting it from within that section will destroy it permanently from which it cannot be recovered.
Since it sounds like this is already what you're doing, could you give this a try with 48 or less items and let me know if you see better results? We've had some reports of unexpected behaviour when permanently destroying 49 or more items at once.
Let me know what you find and we'll go from there. 🙂
ref: dev/core/core#17690