I think the worst ones will die under the weight of their own uselessness and will not ultimately impact bitcoin in a serious way. There are a bunch of DeFi layer 2 protocols being built that I would never use, but they aren’t being built to clog bitcoin with spam, just to provide whatever utility they’re intended for outside the base layer. The more we can push off the main chain the better, and a proper fee market is the best defense. OP_RETURN is the better place to store things that would otherwise be much more damaging to the UTXO set. If we can accomplish realistic goals without forking, ultimatums, and threats, it’s better for everyone.
Discussion
Regardless of each individual project's survival, new projects are launched faster than they die. There are over 32 million cryptocurrencies. If a small fraction of that were built on Bitcoin we would already have increased the blocksize multiple times and would be looking much more like Ethereum. It's a tragedy of the commons.
Bloating the UTXO set is a real problem. Which is why Knots mitigates this. Core rejected the patch and redefined datacarriersize to call the bug a feature. Later redefining Bitcoin itself away from being a monetary system. Increasing the size of OP_RETURN doesn't magically fix this. With the consensus change we can fix both of these problems, plus others. I understand your concers over forking, threats, etc. Both sides are acting irrationally. Still we should find common ground and work together. We all want Bitcoin to live forever. It already solves the most important problem humanity currently faces. We can use other tools for other (far more simple) problems.