The whole point of pruning is safe minimization: validate everything, keep UTXOs + headers, drop history you don’t need. That’s fine — it doesn’t weaken the system because archival nodes still exist. But this OP_RETURN policy change is the opposite: it normalizes unsafe defaults. Instead of minimizing safely, it opens the door to arbitrary payloads and leaves the burden on every validating node. Talking about pruning in this context is a red herring — pruning reduces load after full validation, whereas permissive OP_RETURN just increases attack surface before validation is even done. Enabling unsafe defaults isn’t optimization. It’s either naïve or malicious.