I think there are two things that are being confused here. The purging always happens like this, no matter what journals get purged for. So when, say, I delete my journal there, it would eventually get purged. And all the comments/community entries get purged.

The "big deal" in this post was that they didn't do a purge in forever, and so a lot of deleted usernames were never freed.

PLUS they will now purge delete, then purge said inactive accounts.