Here's a different question which may be relevant: why unitary transforms?

That is, if you didn't in the first place know about the Born rule, what would be a (even semi) intuitive justification for the restriction that all "reasonable" transforms/time evolution operators have to conserve the squared magnitude?

Given the Born rule, it seems rather obvious, but the Born rule itself is what is currently appears to be suspiciously out of place. So, if that arises out of something more basic, then why the unitary rule in the first place?