I consider most of the micropayments used by most v4v that I know of, including podcasting 2.0 and zaps, to be spam on the Lightning network. Because they are mostly below the dust limit and get burned in a force close.

People don't realise this either because they are transacting within custodial platforms (I guess primal, fountain, wos etc), or they haven't taken a look at the fees they pay.

If they did, and/or if they didn't use custodians, they will quickly find that the fees are not economical. 1 sat fee on 21 sat zap is almost 4.8%.

Why the 1 sat fee? Because no rational routing node or LSP would want to route dust for free due to the risk of force closes, and they can't very well raise their ppm fees, so they instead set a base fee to discourage spam.

We are currently seeing empty mempools and low fees. Now imagine the same dynamics with full mempools and a volatile on-chain fee market.

Ecash could be a way to fix this, and should be a natural step for custodial services by only creating a lightning transaction when the balance is well above the dust limit.