What I'm wondering is where is MisterBigg? He was the dude saying if we removed the blocksize limit then miners would be stuffing everything into one block, even things paying 1 satoshi. I think that idea has been thoroughly debunked, particularly recently - his school of thought cannot explain the current phenomenon, and we're nowhere near the 1MB limit. More evidence we should just get rid of it.
Indeed it seems that the issue of orphan blocks alone will stop miners from creating blocks that are too large in size. The fee market will be more based on that than the enforced limit.
Agreed. It is something I hadn't considered but the "orphan cost" does constrain block size. I do think retaining a hard cap for the interim future (possibly raised to 5 or 10 MB) is a good thing. A malicious actor (and thus not interested in orphan cost) could do some damage to adoption by bloating the blockchain with very large blocks.