You’re right that technologically, the fork has no effect. What was possible before remains possible after. The point of the fork is sociological. Give the Knots folk their own chain with their own rules. A clean break from Core.

This is not true in the same way as OP_RETURN and that's literally the whole point of contention. This has been stated and refuted nearly millions of times at this point.

The underlying assumption of data contiguity being irrelevant is wrong. That's literally been the entire debate. One side thinking contiguous byte order is irrelevant and the otherside arguing MANY MANY ways that it is. But what ever, forks like this won't stop anything. Remove OP_RETURN standardness and increase the witness weight to see real results. Then Fake pubkeys, taproot annex, fake sighash, ALL don't matter, as long as you pay. If spam outbids financials, fair enough. Economics should be the only determinant.