The Satoshi part was a bit of a troll regarding Peter Todd (who I believe helped implement it)
In all seriousness, it’s a release valve to embed arbitrary data while preventing UTXO bloat. Without it, you could argue people would use worse ways to store arbitrary data on the blockchain. That’s the compromise.
That would seem so today. Was that the original use? I haven't dug deep yet
He probably just wanted to be able to include messages like in the genesis block. He probably understood that it could be used for other functions in the future, but didn't predict how retarded it would get.
It appears it was the original intention. If you’re digging deep you really need to look at how witness data is used vs. what people actually do with 40 or 80 bytes of op return (basically nothing).
