contrary to common sense, deleting a category doesn't actually remove its runs from the database - they still count towards the sidebar on your profile page, and if you manage to find the url to them you can still edit them. is there an easy way to find all of these runs so i can delete them and make the number accurate again?
I don't think you can even delete those "purgatory" runs.
For example, in this game: https://www.speedrun.com/arzea I created a test category to check something, added some dummy runs in it, and then deleted the category after I finished with my experiments. The dummy runs are still on the site, they even show up on the "Recent runs" widget; and if I try to access any of them, I get an error message that the category is not found, and I can't do any further actions (even as moderator).
Even if you could get to them, moderators can't delete individual runs anyway, you can only verify/reject them.
Runs from deleted categories aren't fully deleted so that they can be restored in case the category was deleted by accident or something like that. It's definitely a bug that they're still represented in stats and such though. You could try asking site staff to permanently delete the category for you, idk if they'll do that for you though.
When someone deletes a category, if you look in the audit log it shows that all the runs in that category have been deleted