I have spoken with Apple and they’re support team, this is completely an engineering thing and they’re saying it is behaving correctly. They did the same thing with iOS 8, why fix what isn’t broken? This is the last response that I received today, 1/19/23
“As of yesterday, the engineering group says that the issue is actually expected behavior. I have not seen any other information to say that they plan to try and change the way the messages currently display when deleting messages.
If you would like to see the feature changed or switched back to how you had it before, you can let the engineering group know of that request at apple.com/feedback.”
The lady that helped me was super nice and agreed with me that it shouldn’t be like this. I see that there’s other numerous people on here with the same feeling. It’s irritating. Anyway hope you all can send feedback to Apple at the link above in my message body and let them know it isn’t going to work.