IMO, but big point of the debate is around growth of the blockchain. Monetary transactions take up a small amount of space, but much of this spam is exploiting data/filtering limit holes, for example in SegWit additions to Bitcoin.

This means data storage requirements to run a node have been growing at a much more rapid rate. This makes node running less accessible/more expensive, and take a lot longer for an initial sync (and more network resources).

The Bitcoin network needs more nodes, not less. Thus, this is a threat to the primary objective of Bitcoin in the first place. There really is no need for non-monetary transactions, especially if they harm Bitcoin in any way.