no, op_return are provably unspendable, meaning you can prune them from the utxoset. If you store data in bare pubkey outputs (like the butcoin whitepaper): These are *permanent* and you have to store them forever, even on pruned nodes, since you can’t prove they are unspendable. This would be a growing fixed size burden for pruned nodes which is really bad. Thats why encouraging op_return for data is a good thing, even if it’s not the most economical compared to witness data.