I can see now why using OP RETURN is less costly for nodes and safer than fake pubkeys or inscriptions. but i’m wondering, does this incremental limit 512 → 1024 really make a big difference? i mean, if an attacker really wants to, they could just pay the fees and send multiple OP RETURNs anyway also, since some wallets or L2 solutions can batch or compress OP RETURN data the node impact can already be somewhat controlled does this limit actually change much?
It wouldn't change much.
But this is the beauty and horror of subtleness. It makes changes easier to accept.
Even OP Return full limit being removed wouldn't change much since it still can't stop spams that can't be prunned
protocols needing unprunable data for permanence may increase their use of using fakepubkey outputs if demand grows