I set my Core v30 datacarriersize=83 and its back to how it was in Core v29 That said I agree with your sentiment of a philosophical pivot. Don't like it at all. Also the tone death push for this change that clearly didn't have sufficient broader support to be pushed though is worrying. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of old coins sold since this was pushed through was because of this.
Discussion
It is not back tothe way it was before version 29. You can now have multiple outputs, meaning even though the maximum bite size is 83, you can have multiple OP_RETURN outputs. They also uncapped the number of OP_RETURN outputs per transaction.