It looks like the subject was brought up again with a different approach, but I'm not smart enough to understand how its different or the implication of the 5 commits being merged as of 2 days ago:
As pointed out up-thread: it was closed in favor of an alternative approach that kept the setting but changed the default.
You might have also missed that in the middle the project published a statement clarifying its approach to the default policy behavior for relay:
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2025/06/06/relay-statement/ Nice, at least it shows a little dose of listening to the concerns. I didn't really buy any arguments regarding technical debt for keeping a setting like that, because it is very small that it is practically irrelevant in terms of workload. I don't like that it is marked deprecated already, which is why I assume many people downvoted it in addition to their general concerns on this topic. If it gets removed in the near future, then the listening was sadly just fake posturing.
I do wonder though
, whether this change would be reverted or not if the naysayers end up being mostly right in the future
whether this change would be reverted or not. If not, such an outcome would clarify a lot of things. Let's wait and see.
