Maybe. It's really hard to tell.

Also good to stop and think; are Bitcoin Core devs themselves being tricked by some unseen forces?

How do we suss this out?

It seems like keeping the blockchain small and growing as slowly as possible is the best outcome for maximum decentralization, so why wouldn't people who want data on the blockchain (AKA "spam" according to some folks) append a hash of the data rather than raw data itself? It seems like a reasonable compromise, but it's still far from clear for me.

Is this already a stale argument? It's a challenge to keep up with this ongoing debate.