Being part of the consensus rule doesn't mean something is not a bug or exploitable. Read my two examples again, they were also part of the consensus rules and yet they were bugs in the protocol that could have been exploited.
Your premise appears to be that any kind of data storage, unrelated to transactional data, isn't a valid use of Bitcoin. But I'm not convinced developers see things in such black and white terms. I've certainly seen some developer discussion relating to the
standardisation of data storage, but I don't see any particular push to restrict it completely. Perhaps the patches you're referring to weren't the correct format in which devs were looking to support data storage.
Is it possible you might be working under the assumption that devs want to prevent data storage
because they made those particular changes? If so, I think you might be misinterpreting what they were looking to achieve.