The first comment in the pull request is: "The maximum size for OP_RETURN outputs used to be 80 bytes, then got changed to 40 bytes to be on the safe side. We have now been running with 40 bytes for about 9 months, and nothing catastrophic happened to the Blockchain, so I am proposing to increase it back to 80 bytes."
The commit that is referenced by this comment is "script: reduce OP_RETURN standard relay bytes to 40" https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/8175c790eb
There you can see that it was originally 80 bytes.
What do you mean by "originally"? It looks like it was introduced as 80 bytes here, so it had only been 80 bytes for a year or so: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2738
I recognize the commit where the limit was lowered, though I don't believe it was actually released before being raised again.
Here is the commit where it was raised from 40 to 80: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5286/commits/a930658...
If you believe if was ever lowered, show me the commit.
The Coindesk articles contains the phrase "OP_RETURN was originally meant to store 80 bytes of extra data in a bitcoin transaction". How do they know what it was originally meant to do? If it meant to do it, why wasn't it in the source?