I can see enormous benefits to daylighting rivers, not unlike removing dams, but there is a problem with the utopian (progressive) impetus for it.

IMO, the only reasonable motive for public action is to preserve life (including your own). Thinking you can improve a place by removing what is there and replacing is a little like killing the villagers to preserve the village. Once you remove wholesale what other earlier people built, however destructive and flawed originally, you are removing life preserving information. You are using the same hubristic approach that produced these flawed structures to start with.

Now, with hindsight, it's not that you can't improve the past structures, but you first have to appreciate them and change them according to their own intrinsic characteristics (their "forms," etc.). Rather than daylight the entire section of river, creating a separate (and separtatable) park space, it would be more preservationist to create "fingers" of daylighted space that seek to mesh with the urban environment around it. That way, you don't lose "memory," you don't have a massive (simplified) superimposed system to manage, and you spread the management responsibility around to nearby stakeholders. You might get rid of some NIMBY resistance to daylighting that way too.

https://www.planetizen.com/node/94724/bringing-urban-rivers-back-daylight