Most entities get autoremoved in 24 hours, but merging them keeps them around for a minimum of 48 hours. As such, if you want to get rid of something as an autoeditor, it's very tempting to empty it and let it be autoremoved, while a merge would be preferable.

Additionally, it's not uncommon for people to add artists for their release or whatnot, get sidetracked, and find out they've been autoremoved by the time they try to finish the whole thing the next day. Or a relationship gets removed, and suddenly the entity is empty, and gets autoremoved before the editor can react (even if the editor who removed the relationship is nice and leaves a note!).

Relatedly, but on the other direction, we have had reports that incorrect artists are buggy because they do not get autoremoved. The reason is that the artist credits they were used in take 7 days to get removed, a lot longer than the 24 hours the artist itself will need once the AC is gone.

We are planning to set the RemoveEmpty time to 48 hours / 2 days, up from 1 day, giving users a bit more time to react to edits that would lead to autoremoval.
We will also set the RemoveUnreferencedRows time to 48 hours / 2 days, down from 7 days, which makes it more consistent and hopefully less confusing to users.

48 hours was chosen as this is the minimum time an open merge/remove edit needs to apply, so manual and automatic removals will be consistent.

— Original ticket —

Title: Don't delete empty/unused artist entities automatically

Description: MusicBrainz encourages merging of deletions (MBS-8379) yet there are good reasons to not delete artists automatically: MBS-10844

There is also a bug that prevents editors from being notified that a deletion will happen: MBS-10499