Since the original fix was set to be a “reasonable” transaction to reduce allocations and the true motivation later revealed, it makes sense to relax this check to something more principled.
There are more exotic transaction patterns that could take advantage of a relaxed requirement, such as 1 input, 1 output OP_RETURN to burn a utxo to fees for CPFP purposes when change isn’t practical.
Two changes could be accomplished:
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Anything not 64 bytes could be allowed
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Anything above 64 bytes could be allowed
In the Great Consensus Cleanup, suggestion (2) was proposed as a consensus change, and is the simpler of the two suggestions. It would not allow an “empty” OP_RETURN but would reduce the required padding from 22 bytes to 5.
The functional test is also modified to test the actual case we care about: 64 bytes
Related mailing list discussions here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-October/020995.html And a couple years earlier: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-May/017883.html