unfortunately those that PR'd this protected event protection into strfry did not think to make it optional. if you want you can patch it to the previous behavior of accepting them. I have a fork where I reverted it. https://github.com/jeremyd/strfry
Discussion
Learning a lot right now.. strfry implements NIP-70 but not NIP-42. There is some recent work for NIP-42:
https://github.com/hoytech/strfry/pull/156
So maybe that will be merged soon.