I should also emphasise the word "might", in contrast to the current proposals which certainly don't work.
The goal of the filter people is to censor OP_RETURN and inscriptions specifically. They have no rational basis for this, as you explained, but I'm just taking this goal at face value.
Without a consensus change it's impossible to stop the transactions from going through eventually, but you could try intimating miners into self-censorship. We know from human societies that a fairly small group of people can control a very large group at fairly low cost. A key ingredient seems to be to disproportionately punish offenders to set an example.
So if you can gather a few percent of hash rate that enforces these arbitrary filters through reorgs (N deep, depending on budget), some pools will experience noticeable losses. This then encourages them to be on the safe side and use these filters. Bitcoin Core might then have to adopt similar rules in order to produce blocks that are safe.
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To be clear, this won't permanently censor these transactions either, but because not everyone is going to be sufficiently intimidated. But it will delay them more than in the scenario where those miners only exclude things from their own blocks. And definitely delay them more than can be achieved with just policy, even if 90% of nodes used these filters.
"We can't stop something, therefore we should allow or enable it" is known as an appeal to futility, and it's often a subset of the either/or fallacy, also called binary thinking.
It's a powerful framing shift: if you can't stop something 100%, then why bother trying at all?
But the real world is messier than that. People have choices, but 80% follow defaults. Harmful behavior is possible, but not inevitable. And well-intentioned changes to working systems can have unexpected consequences.
I'm a big fan of Bitcoin Core — it has brought us a long way. But no single developer always gets it right. Listening to the broader community often makes the system stronger.
