Yes. I am talking about the project page. There is two kinds of deleting and both are not good. The first is deletion and creating a new project with same url. That one gets a new id. The second is as the first, but you do not delete, but make it unavailable and create a new url. Also gives a new id, but breaks bookmarks and links as well. If you see version numbering in url, that is often an indicator that the dev engages in this activity.

It gets even more awful, if there is payment active, since itch and the dev are supposed to keep the files available.

Projects can have the same name. And the same title. Usernames can not. And project urls are tied to the username.

Furthermore projects have an ID. I saw some peculiarites happen, but for the most part, the ID is not only unique, but it counts up. And to identify games in collections or purchases, the ID is used. If someone deletes a project and creates it new, even with same url, it has a new ID and will not replace the old one in collections. It is for all intents and purposes a new game. It gets worse, if the old game gets deleted, it will silently dissapear from collections, leaving a hole in them. A collection page has 36 items. If you open a collection and see only 35 items on a page, one of the items was removed. Possibly due to the issue I talk about here.

That ... makes a little bit of sense. Otherwise how could they distinguish the files, if they are named the same. So they probably require unique file names within a project and overwrite old files with new ones when the name matches.