not the same thing though. in a multisig, I'd need someone else to sign off on my spending. with a covenant, I don't need permission to send but I'm still restricted on where it goes. in terms of censorship, that scales much better for the censor than sending funds to a multisig. plus I don't think "we can already do that" is a good argument for doing another bad thing. "I already stole. so what's a another theft?"
Discussion
The difference is, the covenant restrictions you decide for yourself when you generate the recieve address. Nobody but you can restrict the future spends....
that would make sense. it still has the issue of being more easily scalable for this abuse. with a recursive covenant, the encumberance stays with the utxo as it's spent. as I understand it, you end up in a tainted Bitcoin scenario. at least the "tainted" Bitcoin we have now can have their history severed with a coinjoin