No, I don't think you can do that in a single command. It would be nice for 'rclone purge' to obey the flag '--leave-root' so that it would not delete the current directory. Perhaps that could be a enhancement request.
Purge is specifically delete this directory and all contents and is implemented by some cloud providers so you can get rid of a directory very quickly with a single API call.
That said if purge had a --leave-root flag then it could run the fallback path (which does iterate and delete each file and directory) so it would be relatively easy to implement, but might be inefficient.
The other option could be for the delete command to also rmdirs on the touched directories but I also see this as being possibly inefficient because it would need to check they were empty for each file deletion or run it at the end only on the 'touched' directories but it doesn't keep track.
EDIT: Seems the option on purge would be more efficient than the option on the delete. I suppose the inefficiency can't be less efficient than having to run a delete and then a rmdirs though.
If I’ve filtered, meaning there are still files that are remaining, another command is necessary to remove them, ideally rclone delete which should expand to deleting folders too, not just objects.
As for move, let’s continue it on the other thread and leave this solely for delete and related.
It comes down to efficiency. rclone doesn't keep track of whats in those directories as it deletes files. It would need additional API calls to gather as it deletes and hope that nothing was added while it was working. It leverages expensive API calls where filesystems don't.
But cloud objects and file system objects are very different hence why there are different ways of dealing with things. rm and rmdir is a linux delete tool. del, deltree acts differently and is windows. Trying to make everything look like 'rm' wouldn't work as the storage is different.
There are so many commands that can blow up a system / lose data /etc and making more default things just makes using the tool harder.
You can't always protect someone from doing something.
While you might find it important (this is about perception not reality), it seems no one else picked it up nor worked on it so in that perception, it wasn't important.
Perception is reality so your perception isn't wrong just different than mine
Remember rclone has about maybe 100,000 users so I can't be breaking backwards compatibility for people unless it is really really important.
I think there is an issue about that to add a --interactive flag like rm and friends have.
I have thought about adding rmcpmv commands with their exact unix semantics. This will make them less efficient than the current commands but they could be done...