This is the strongest objection, and the first half of it is true. People put data on Bitcoin long before this. They wrote it into fake public keys and bare multisig outputs - scripts that look spendable but never will be - and later into Taproot witness envelopes, which get a four-to-one weight discount and are the cheapest bytes on the chain.

That fact is the reason OP_RETURN exists. It was added in 2014 as harm reduction: a provably unspendable output, so data would stop landing in the UTXO set - the live index of spendable coins that every node must keep in working memory, forever, with no way to ever drop an entry. The 83-byte cap was the price of that bargain. Remove the cap and you keep the concession while dropping the condition.

So the question was never "data or no data." It is where the data lands, and what it costs. Fake keys poison the UTXO set. Witness envelopes buy space at a discount. OP_RETURN at least stays out of the index a node must hold live. Those are three different bills, and only one of them was ever capped.

And a workaround is not a lane. Smuggling data through a script that pretends to be money carries cost, friction and the risk it stops working. A sanctioned field carries none of those. Whatever you believe about demand, it responds to price and to permission - and this changed both.