GPO for "Delete profiles older than..." Not working properly - windows

Question

I am attempting to figure out the details of why the GPO for deleting user profiles older than X days is not working properly in our environment. I have read tons of sites/posts about this same issue, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it just may not work properly for us.
We have the GPO set for over 180 days and it is being applied to the machines, but then we ran into the issue where Windows Update (or something else) was updating the NTUSER.dat file so no profile was ever getting deleted. We applied the script that I have found in several places online (posted below) that is updating the LastWriteTime of the NTUSER.dat file to the same date as the LastWriteTime of the user's profile folder. It did just that, but the GPO is now deleting pretty much every profile that exists on the machines (aside from default) no matter how long it has been logged in, even if it's less than a week. Because of this, we have disabled the GPO and script for now.
After more research, found out that the LastWriteTime of the user profile is not necessarily accurate with logins either. This date can often be really far behind when the actual person logged in, resulting in accidental deletions. Other posts also state that the GPO no longer uses the NTUSER.dat but instead a reg key, which doesn't exist in our environment (likely because we're on an older OS (Server 2012 R2)). There were updates released in Oct 2020 for this/a similar issue, but our servers are up to date on patches.
Does anyone have a solid fix for this issue? It seems to be pretty widespread over the years with tons of people having the same problem. I don't know if newer OS's have the issue anymore, but that would be helpful to know too. We plan to upgrade to Server 2019 here in the future, but that's not coming for a bit.
If there is not a known solid fix for it, any recommendations on a file that I can reference in a custom script to check against when deleting profiles? One that for sure gets updated every login, but does not get affected by Windows Updates or AV?
Also please note that I cannot introduce new software such as delprof2 due to our security constraints, so I am looking for either a solution to the GPO problem or something I can implement in a custom script (which I can/will write).
Here is the script we are using to update the NTUSER.dat file that was found online. Several others had mostly success with it initially, but seems to not be the case any longer.
Thanks in advance
$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$Report = $Null
$Path = "C:\Users"
$UserFolders = $Path | GCI -Directory
ForEach ($UserFolder in $UserFolders)
{
$UserName = $UserFolder.Name
If (Test-Path "$Path\$UserName\NTUSer.dat") {
$Dat = Get-Item "$Path\$UserName\NTUSer.dat" -force
$DatTime = $Dat.LastWriteTime
If ($UserFolder.Name -ne "default") {
$Dat.LastWriteTime = $UserFolder.LastWriteTime
}
Write-Host $UserName $DatTime
Write-Host (Get-item $Path\$UserName -Force).LastWriteTime
$Report = $Report + "$UserName`t$DatTime`r`n"
$Dat = $Null
}
}