This is a great response and I don't want a short change my response to it. Part of the problem is that the difference between a monetary transaction and spam are arbitrary. The most fair way to let people use Bitcoin is to have the user decide how much they are willing to spend to send their transaction. See to me if it's not monetary then I'm not sure what they're spending on a fee to send the transaction. My argument is the user gets to decide what is and is not monetary to them. One small group of people trying to decide what a monetary transaction is is precisely why Satoshi made Bitcoin. Fee is the mechanism by which spam is prevented. Not filters.
But circling back it's not my argument that filters work and having them stops valid transactions. That's not the case. My argument is that filters exist so users can have more control over the performance of their node and prevent themselves from sending unintended transactions. No matter what this filter is set to a node's performance will likely be around the same. No one's going to accidentally submit a transaction with a large OP return. This takes about 250 to 300 lines out of Bitcoin. Removing it settles this whole debacle. Removing it ultimately makes the code base cleaner and more maintainable unless prone to cultural drama like this in the future.
