Right I probably haven't phrased that right about it still being a PR, but my understanding was that Peter Todd put forward the PR and Core was looking to merge until things blew up, or at least I got that impression from watching Mechanics video
Discussion
Antoine posted to the mailing list about fixing a problem with an L2 Citrea was developing (" I suggest to start by lifting the restriction on the size of the scriptPubKey for OP_RETURN outputs, as a first minimal step to stop encouraging harmful behaviour"), then Peter refiled his previously rejected PR to immediately lift all related restrictions and immediately remove related configuration options. That then engaged people, and got Peter invited onto conference panels to talk about himself.