Why would a new statue of a different thing be definitely a duplicate?! It shouldn’t be, but reviewers do strange things at times. Personally I do not submit things for removal until I can replace them with something else, because I do not like to get nasty messages from community members about why I deleted xyz, so I prefer to submit the new thing first and only remove when it already has a replacement because that protects me somewhat
The mural thing has been discussed at length on the forums. I am not good at finding links
But here is one.