I am sad to hear that. As Andrew Poelstra says OP_CAT (with added limitations to fix the issues why it was disabled by Satoshi), is probably one of the smallest and safest soft forks we can do. It is just a few lines of code. If we can't do even this, it's very bad. We have to overcome the ptsd trauma from segwit activation drama.. All these recently proposed opcodes are MUCH smaller scope of changes that Taproot or Segwit softforks. And we can't frweez development of L1 of we want to support self custody for more people. It's either L1 continues to develop of custody solutions for most users.
Discussion
Nailed it on PTSD. The outrage against OP_CAT is out of proportion relative to the scope of the change.
But at this point it’s tribal warfare. Doubtful it will get a fair hearing.
“It’s just a few lines of code” is already a red flag
No it's not, it's important context that many people don't know. Compared to segwit and Schnorr that were huge. You can reason much more easily about small code change. Of course that itself doesn't make it safe, but it is important to know this.