I'd prefer to handle the pre/post distinction in the Gearset app itself instead or in addition to a local file upload. For users who operate mostly in Gearset without managing local files, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be maintaining a separate file outside the Gearset environment for deletion.

We've encountered several use cases where we wished we could define pre and post. One of the most recent ones being that: we're deleting a field that has dependencies with some Custom Metadata fields or records. During the deployment, neither Gearset nor Salesforce knows which one should be deleted first, and we kept hitting deployment error because of the dependencies, so that we had to resort to manual pre/post deployment steps. While doing manual steps isn't usually a big deal, the necessity for them becomes an issue in CI/CD and roll-back conversations.

Just tried to do this. Phooey. I suppose I'll have to compare with an empty org instead, as can't remove the components from the master source (they now have different types and need to be redeployed, not deleted)