You can delete a text, but you can’t delete someone reading it at 11:42 p.m.

Deletion removes the record and not the event. The message was read, and whatever it did happened at the moment of reading, which is not something any interface can reach back into. Removing it afterwards mostly changes what you have to look at, while the other person keeps the version they saw.

Put the gap before the send rather than after it. When something feels urgent to write, leave it ten minutes, and treat anything you later want to delete as information about the next one.