Opinions on Opal banning?

Oko and lattice too, of course, but personally I find opal more interesting

I don't have much view into the modern metagame, but friends who do have said it's been at the heart of a lot of powerful-to-OP decks for the past few years.

Well yes, it has been the core of Affinity for a while

They speculate WotC was trying to ban around it rather than ban it directly, because its price is high and it can help sell packs as a premium mythic include. But it looks like they've confronted that it's gotta go.

I'm not a modern player really, I'm just wondering what might happen

They try to avoid banning the actual problem in decks and instead ban the shell supporting it

The question mainly is, can Affinity recover from that? It loses most of it's speed/consistency now, not sure if it can bounce back