Sure, the filters aren’t 100% effective. But can we agree that they might make it more difficult or costly to get that kind of content onto the blockchain? Plus, my own node isn’t relaying that content, so I’m not contributing to spreading it. I’m not sure how the limited effectiveness of the filters supports the idea of removing them. It feels like a non-sequitur to me.

Yes, if the whole network has the filters on, then the uploader has to go directly to the miners, probably paying a higher fee. However, this only incentivises them to put the content in the witness data, which is worse than using OP_RETURN that can be pruned. And as soon as the transaction gets into a block, your node starts spreading the content.