At Special:Contributions and history pages there is the option "Deleted only", which implies deleted edits (in the archive table), when really it's only returning revision deleted edits. Embarrassingly I've been misled all this time... completely unaware of Special:DeletedContributions.
We can of course simply change [[MediaWiki:History-show-deleted]] to "Revision deleted only" but I think this should probably be the MediaWiki default.
We might also link to Special:DeletedContributions somewhere for clarity/convenience, but we can save that for another patch, or blame it on my ignorance :)