One of my rules copies "if file exists: replace the existing file". It works fine, except the replaced versions unexpectedly end up in the trash. How to turn that off?
If you copy a file over an existing one and replace it, no other software I know of will move the old version into the Trash. Certainly not Finder. Anyway, I asked how to stop this, not if it was the WAY THINGS ARE meant to be.
Hazel rarely deletes anything outright because of the irreversible aspect of it. It puts it in the trash so that it can be recovered. The one main exception to this is Hazel's functions to delete files from the trash itself.