Yes they are web servers, but most content on the web is on a single server, with rebroadcasting your note ends up on hundreds of servers, maybe as we grow this becomes 1000s of servers.
Relying on asking nicely or state laws is just not gonna work, nostr is built to resist this. That's why torrents don't go down - which we are closer to than a traditional webserver.
Happy to be proven wrong, I would love to delete some notes. Even now our "deletes" are more like "a request to no longer serve" without actually removing the content from the server.