Maybe this should be made clear since I don't even know if people agree with me on it, but the difference in NIP-29 is that the relay shouldn't give all random events to anyone who walks by unless they include an "h" tag at least.
Discussion
I agree with that and that's how my implementation behaves
Ah, that explains it. I was imagining standard filter behavior, but this is totally reasonable. It is, however, an instance of negative filtering, which some people are rabidly against. It's just baked into the spec rather than included in a filter object.
Who are these people and why are they against it?
I think I get it, but I think that comes from a misunderstanding. The default "dumb relay" mode of Nostr was made for public broadcast microblogging data organized in a simple chronological feed of people you follow. If we want other use cases we have to adapt.