We usually do not ignore or drop event payloads, even if they contain virtually no data. However, the event_id has a special meaning. How are you testing this – against sentry.io or a local Sentry instance?
Most importantly, you cannot reuse an event ID. If you send an event, delete it and then send another one with the same event_id, it will remain deleted. There are certain “optimizations” in our pipeline, due to which you may temporarily see this event, but after some time it will be gone.