Yes and no. If the people who managed to pushed through the op_return change also buddy buddy with the majority of, or the largest mining pools, they do in some way control it. Then they have effectively bypassed most of the nodes in the network, just like the "pay a miner to include in a block" and on a larger scale. If this happens where is the decentralised part of bitcoin?

I’m on that train with you. I just want all the devs to get humbled, all of them.

The whole reason for v30 bringing mempool in line with consensus is because miners are running transaction marketplaces out of band and this benefits large miners at the expense of small miners. Devs and miners have no power beyond that which is provided by economic node operators, which these days are basically exchanges and ETFs.

So instead of having a small opening to misuse you expect opening it up completely removes the problem? Like removing speed limits on roads? It's a flawed statement. One used over and over without solving anything. That plus Lopp openly saying that the reason is "a use case by Citrea": to be able to broadcast and instantly verify information/data without waiting for it to be included in a block. If the miner centralisation is the/an issue that people actually want to solve, then support things like small miner projects. Bring back the original idea by Satoshi, one miner in every home. That would be a place to start. Remove the incentive to pool everything together like in most centralised blockchains controlled by one or a few large entities. Work on making bitcoin what it was actually created to be: an alternative to the flawed legacy system. Money for the people not the banks.