attempted to do such a thing
What do you mean by "do such a thing"?
Perhaps I wasn't clear:
Right now and since some time ago multiple major miners enforce no opreturn limits. So whatever bad thing you think they are stopping are not being stopped by them, because you can connect directly to these miners and just give them a transaction.
Right now (and since uhh 2011?) you can just rent hashpower to point at your own bitcoin daemon and mine whatever block you want, the miners can't see what you're doing beyond the block header. No one can tell whose devices were working on producing your block.
This is already the state of affairs.
The whole illegal content line of argument is even more foolish than the spam one, because it's a binary condition (is there something illegal or isn't there, volume of it is not particularly relevant) and necessarily done out of malice-- and so merely making it more complicated or somewhat expensive doesn't change the security consideration.
The theory that it matters at all is entirely based on the conjecture that e.g. the US would enforce the strict liability standard for unlawful content in a node-- that it doesn't matter if you put it there willingly, doesn't matter if you have the means to access it, doesn't matter if you even know about it, doesn't matter that it's hex encoded and inaccessible in the node software but via debug interfaces, doesn't matter that it's encrypted on disk and on the wire, and finally assumes someone is willing to risk prison handling the data to do it.
And under that sort of assumption it's very clear that none of this policy stuff can help, because the attacker can just rent hashpower and mine a block-- something you or I could do, and the attacker might well be an expressly bitcoin hostile state actor.
there are things that could help, but the filter advocates are doing their best to make sure they aren't complete developed. I guess it's not a shock when you write about institutionalized mining and its vulnerability to arbitrary state control as if it were a good thing
, apparently unable to see the gun pressed to your opponents forehead can just as easily be pressed to yours.