Not really. From my vantage point there seems to be nothing positive in it for the "Knots-side". I think, to hazard a guess one would need to have some understanding of the target audiences here - for which I have none... To me it simply does not make much sense. Perhaps needless to say, I'm impressed by neither the new relaying defaults nor core's ability to make it harder to spam the blockchain.

Although I still do not want to hazard a guess, the question did cause more curiosity to arise. I came to think about the implications of having a system for local filtering what one stores and not having one. IANAL and I do not keep up with legal developments around the world - or at all really -, but the Compuserve case came to mind (think it was Compuserve?). Anyway, the point from that thing was that there seems to be different culpability scenarios depending on if there are attempts to filter, where not attempting to filter seems to be the better choice - on the local level. I'm mostly thinking about filtering what is permanently stored. Changing the rules for everyone to make it harder to publish junk is still a good idea.