Use when deciding whether a table or artifact should keep existing, planning a table drop or deprecation, auditing a lakehouse for dead/zero-consumer tables, or building maintenance-job coverage across many tables. Covers the consumers-or-deprecate discipline (every table names a reader or gets flagged for removal), the drop-durability trap (a get_or_create-style helper silently resurrecting a "dropped" table on its next write), the metadata-vs-physical split of a drop (catalog drop_table does not delete files), and generating maintenance coverage from the catalog instead of a hand-maintained list. Don't use for choosing a storage format or catalog backend, or schema evol…
