This is resolved, there was an issue in the soap request not using the correct oac host.

Thanks @JohnW-Oracle @Gianni Ceresa for the quick reply. While looking more into the catalog items I was trying to delete, like with extension .xdo, their type was returned Folder. So, the removeFolder operatoin, with recursive set to true, did remove the .xdo item from the webcatalog. The documentation for deleteItem says…