filters allow node runners to have an ongoing discussion and voice in the never ending political debate of what they consider spam and what not. It is not censorship, because it wont prevent anything to get into the chain with 100% certainty, but it probabilistically reduces the amount of certain types of transactions showing up on chain.

It also prevents you as the node runner from having e.g. CSAM in your node and prevents you as the miner from committing CSAM to the blockchain.

There are data storage systems, even decebtralized ones for people to store data.

In Bitcoin, every node runner stores data for free forever, so at least node runners should have their voice to express their opinion what should get into that forever storage.