"Speaking for myself, I hope you believe me when I say that is not the motivation at all. I think these use cases are temporary hype cycles, and not rational use of blockchain space, but the market can stay irrational for a long time. However, I believe that attempts to discourage these use cases through node relay policy, in the presence of widespread evidence that miners accept these transactions anyway, are ineffective, akin to making nodes bury their heads in the sand, and ultimately harmful to the decentralization of the system at large." How is it harmful to decentralization if we set our own mempool relay policy? How does changing the default settings to relay bigger op_returns NOT increase the potential for images to be relayed? Don't see anything new in this answer.

This was a great read, thanks for sharing

This is a good link, thanks for sharing. A very sober take from the responder — my respect.

Because the folks who want to issue junk on the chain opt to go to specific miners directly to include their junk. These specific miners then outperform smaller miners due to the fees they receive in this manner — rinse and repeat this be behavioural pattern and soon we have centralization of mining. The reason why they go about this way is because if they just send their non-standard txs to the mempool of their nodes the propagation path for remain scarce because of the data carrier limit. This limitation feeds this behaviour.