@Murch has provided an excellent answer, but I would also like to mention that there were also some technical arguments in favour of retaining the option. It could allow an ideological miner with a stratumv2 or datum template provider, or ideological mining pool to exclude these OP_RETURN transactions from their block template. This has sparked a conversation around potentially separating transaction relay and mining policy, or even retaining the option for this reason. Some might argue even further that nodes adopting a stricter OP_RETURN size limit in their policy could be more likely to relay lower fee transactions to these miners or pools. However, I don't think this is a good idea for all the reasons Murch has laid out. The issue was opened here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/32401.

A similar option also exists for denying the usage of bare multisig (p2ms) outputs (-permitbaremultisig). These are a type of output intended for multisig, but widely used for data embedding through the counterparty protocol and stamps. It is currently default off. Making it default on, or removing it, have led to similar controversies in the past. My expectation is this will be revisited again too depending on the outcome of the current controversy.