The combination of right to be forgotten and GDPR practically mandate that this be the case and, as others have pointed out, in the pre-internet era there would often be no record, unless it had hit the print media. Most criminal offences are expunged (at least in the UK) from your criminal record after a number of years, so why should the internet be allowed to keep a permanent record after your debt to society has been paid?
For sure, although we definitely strayed into moral territory. Even limiting ourselves to authors though, that's a concept whose meaning is radically different nowadays (when it means anyone who can type - including on a touchscreen - and knows how to hit the publish button on Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or wherever) to what it was in the past, when it meant having to go through at least some amount of gatekeeping at the relevant publication.
Would you really want some sort of naively politicised rant that you wrote as a teen and no longer believe to affect your ability to get a job in your mid-thirties? Would that even be fair? Of course not. Yet that's absolutely realistic in a digital world that forgets nothing and where permanent and total erasure isn't an option.
(To be honest, age isn't particularly a factor here: over a period of a couple of decades anyone's beliefs can change quite substantially, and plenty do. Granted, plenty also don't, but entrenchment is a choice, even if one made passively).
