The best I've heard is that the alternative option is to pollute the UTXOset with forever unspendable transactions. This is bad. To be clear, by removing the byte constraint, it doesn't remove this alternative option; but at least, it would give someone the option to take one for the team and pay 4 times as much fee in order to not pollute the UTXOset.

To me, the incentives just don't line up with a realistic expectation that removing the byte constraint will have any significant positive effect. And, we can't really know what all the negative effects might be until after the fact.

*I don't know if this counts as a good steelman; but, it's the best I've heard yet.