To me, this was acceptable until it reached thousands of OP_RETURN transactions per block. See
Mempool Goggles. The larger spam transactions are now replaced by many more small transactions. It's still spam and takes up block space that could have been used by real Bitcoin users.
you can't have it both ways. you either accept and support OP_RETURN and allowing people to store data on the blockchain or you say "No, I don't agree with OP_RETURN at all. Bitcoin was not meant for people to think of as any type of data storage." period the end. the logic that you are going to introduce a special op code to store data so they won't abuse UTXOs is ridiculous in my opinion. but that's what we did and that's where we are. the end results of that...