Well....the result of SegWit actually increased the limit by 4x during that time. However the popular narrative tends to ignore that. I often wonder if miners today (with extremely low fees) have benefited or been harmed by that....hard to know....

That argument is actually immaterial to the larger point. Such a concession to data-storage in core is a signal that developers agree with that use case.

What you incentivize you will get more of....