That the limit is not only ineffective and easily circumvented, but also incentivizes more harmful behavior

The best I've heard is that the alternative option is to pollute the UTXOset with forever unspendable transactions. This is bad. To be clear, by removing the byte constraint, it doesn't remove this alternative option; but at least, it would give someone the option to take one for the team and pay ...

It wasn't added by consensus.