When the OP says, "I want to press 'Delete' and then click on an object in canvas to delete it," I understand that to mean two distinct things happening in sequence: (a) press a key to place the application into "delete mode", then (b) click a mouse button to delete whatever object is located at the current mouse position.

(An equivalent approach, involving something like "Button1 to select, Button3 to select and delete", has no need for any key press, so it seems not to match what the OP was trying to describe, but maybe smh was having trouble expressing it clearly.)

As for "strawman", I know that "pretty much all famous programs" offer a choice of either "select first, then delete" or "click once to select and delete" (because sometimes the risk of error is low enough that the latter really is better). It's reasonable to assume that smh is not developing a famous program; there wasn't enough info in the OP to assume that smh was planning to offer this kind of choice.