I think you are both wrong.

Every email provider of any scale discards somemuch likely spam before it gets anywhere near their users. They use blacklists and honey pots to reject email from IP addresses or blocks of IP addresses that they suspect of sending spam. When they reject like this they don't even wait for the body of the email to rejected, they just refuse the message completely.

But also, I doubt Google take note of what spam you delete. Deleting spam from the spam folder doesn't indicate any reliable intent. You could just as easily be looking in the spam, reading a message you realise isn't spam but then still just delete it when you were finished.