True. But the consensus rules are relaxed for a reason, especially post-satoshi as we've learned that you can only make validation more strict, but not less strict, when you want to honor forward compatibility - which has been the modus operandi since basically forever.

You cannot put that genie back in the bottle without becoming a hardforking shitcoin.

I agree with you. But I've felt the whole op-return conversation lacked people proposing actual rule changes rather than just policy changes. 

Scoresby

Stacker Saloon

saloon

There currently isn't a limit in consensus. Consolidation in the wild is mostly limited by policy ("filters", but let's not inflame.) Setting hard consensus limits is totally awesome, until of course you have someone that wants their BitVM thing to be 500kvB or a new lattice based signature scheme that needs 150kvB,... and you just softforked in 100kvB. Also note, enlarging would become a hard fork.

So yeah let's not?