Filters are useful. And even if they weren’t, I’d rather have node runners decide than a small clique of Chaincode Labs devs. The fact that Core is forcing this change despite the controversy around it is very telling.

It actually does do something useful. It stops the relaying of a tx your node does not wish to relay. Just because a tx can still make it into the block does not make the relay data limit useless. It’s enforcing a policy set by the node runner and the version of code they run. Bitcoin is a monetary network not a jpeg network. Just because Satoshi didn’t specifically say it’s for money only does not make all data equal. It’s a peer to peer e CASH system. Not a peer to peer insert whatever data you like system. I personally don’t care if people are relaying monkey jpegs but non-continuous CSAM is likely a real risk factor and a possible attack vector.