I'm trying to create a personal homebrew subclass for a warlock and I was struggling to get dunamancy spells like Magnify Gravity to add to the classes expanded spell list by putting it in the "additional specific spells" field. So I created copies of these existing spells to add my homebrew subclass to and this has been much easier. (Note: I have bought the spells)

I've learned to give these copies identifiers in the names now but before I learned this I deleted come copies of non-published spells and I see multiple versions of "magnify gravity" in the "additional specific spells" field. I've seen people say "If you've published a creation it can't fully be removed because people could be out there using it" and so on, but I've never published these, or anything for that matter. The systems screams at the top of the creation that it's not original and therefore can't be submitted. So why am I seeing multiple versions of a copy of a spell after deleting said spell?

Something else worth noting. When I go to My Creations and unselect Public and Private I see many of the things I've tried to delete and it gives me the option to restore them or add to my collection. I just want to clean up these up and make them go away.

You cannot. Nothing is permanently deleted, just tucked into a trash folder and hidden. The reason why there is an issue with publishing is that you end up having to create multiple copies. The multiple copies is the actual problem.

What I did is make a barbarian subclass with spellcasting, named it the “Trash Collector,” and made sure to remove it from my collection so nobody can accidentally find it. Whenever I want to “delete” a spell I rename it (trash) and make that subclass the only “class spell list” on which it appears. Then I delete the spell. It still isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing.