The 80-byte OP_RETURN limit hasn’t really “damaged” anyone in a meaningful sense. It’s just been a long-standing policy boundary that shaped how people used the field. If a use case truly needed more space, it could (and did) migrate to off-chain solutions or use alternative encoding schemes. Nobody’s monetary transaction got excluded because of it. That’s why calling it censorship feels misplaced, it was never about blocking valid payments, just about keeping arbitrary data storage from bloating the chain.
Discussion
I agree in principle, yet something feels off with the way ordinals have been handled. If Core really had the prevention of the UTXO bloat set in mind from the beginning, why not remove the OP_RETURN limit in 2023?
Exactly, that point makes sense. It seems the OP_RETURN limit was mainly a gradual policy to control spam and protect network stability, rather than a direct tool to prevent ordinals. If the real goal was to avoid UTXO bloat, removing the limit could have been done much earlier without issues. Most likely, Core considered potential unknown risks and security implications as well.