Ahem. Virtually every drama-generating post on the forum has been created by someone, often the same person, on Cactaur, and the same three or so people who also play on Cactaur fuel those threads by harassing everyone who comes to those threads. So no, it's not a generalization, they are literately disrupting the entire English forum over petty raider nonsense. So your thread was ill timed because it was posted just three minutes before some drama exploded (that thread is now 26 pages.)
Anyway, as I said on the other half of my comment. The game internally tracks id's and the ids do not change even after the server reboots or is patched, because the lodestone id's do not change. Removing someone from the friendslist, mutually friend removal should only be done if the removal is done with a harassment report, because that is the only justification for it. Other people just clean up their friends list because people haven't logged in quite a while and/or know they quit, but wouldn't mind seeing them again.
Like seriously, if SE wants to improve the friends list at all, put a "archived" tab into the friend list, and anyone who hasn't logged in in 30 days gets moved there automatically. Likewise if someone has unsubscribed, move them there automatically. Then once players are moved to the archive page, it's the same as not being on the friend list, and the game doesn't ping it except when you look at the archived list, but you can add them back to the active friend list at any time.
It's not what you're asking for, but would remove some awkward situations where people were removed due to clean up, not drama, but people will always think they did something to get deleted. When I played a different game, I had to clean up friendslists daily by the dozens because popularity comes at a price. Who do you delete? Those people you delete will think you're being a jerk to them (even if they haven't logged in months), those people who you don't add, think you're being stuck-up, etc.