Just a note: I wrote the below in response to a complaint by the OP that has completely been rewritten lol. Leaving it up though because I don't think I've ever gotten it off my chest before.
I don't think anything should be deleted carte blanche or unilaterally, but one of my small complaints about UO is the way that ephemera surrounding events piles up around the land; books in bars, NPCs shouting in present-tense about long-passed events, etc. I'm not totally disagreeing, so hear me out. I find books locked down on tables all around the land's towns, and while I do take the time to read them, they're usually just ghostly snippets of long-past events (edit: as in, mysterious clues usually, which don't make very good records of events). What I don't like is how any major physical acknowledgment of events usually seems to roll up and disappear after the story's over, except for that ephemera.
I do think EMs should be required to clean up after themselves. But I also think (or at least wish) that part of their job could be to help create content that acknowledges that "something happened here." Small books that appear on NPC bookshelves, for instance, chronicling the story arcs that happened on their shard. (We've been finding the same crusty tomes on the land's bookshelves for eighteen years.) Or statues with readable plaques, memorializing battles that happened against various threats throughout time. Maybe your beach should have stayed. In a sandbox, the landscape is supposed to change over time, not only to reflect the present, but to reflect the past. I can't go so far as to say I'm sickened by it--too many other things to worry about honestly--but I do feel there could be some improvement.
