Why should I remove the entry and all its children for each DeletedMetadata when using list_folder?

Hello everyone,

I am keeping a local cache of the contents of my dropbox account using files/list_folder and files/list_folder/continue. There is a guide in the documentation on the exact steps that I need to perform to achieve that, which is absolutely great.

However, I cannot wrap my head around why for each DeletedMetadata I should delete the entry AND all of its children. I understand why we should delete the entry, but what about the children? Since the entry has been deleted in dropbox, this means that all of its children have also been deleted, which in turn means that every child of the entry will receive its own DeletedMetadata. I do not see the benefits of deleting the children together with the entry. 

If I delete only the entry itself whenever I get a DeletedMetadata and not delete its children, will my local cache be in sync with the dropbox contents? 

My uneducated guess would be that we need to do this because if we delete the parent without deleting its children, it would be impossible to delete the children, because we can no longer access them. However, this is not an issue in my case. Deleting parentless children is still possible in the database I am using.

Please let me know if I am missing anything. Perhaps, there is another reason to delete the children that I have not thought of?

Thank you for your time!

Kind regards,

Denis