Bitcoin has been used for other purposes for a long time. Counterparty was created to exchange tokens and early NFTs. Technically any of this could have been done at any time. I don’t like what they’re doing either, but maybe that’s the price to pay to have an open, uncensorable decentralized network.
Discussion
Suggestion for Bitcoin improvement: Move all scripting out of the L1 chain to an L2 chain. Alternatively, reimplement the L1 chain in terms of an L0 chain with no scripting. A transaction would just be a list of inputs and a list of outputs. That way, people who want to save their JPEGs and Pepe tokens to a blockchain like it’s Google Drive can do that, but their files won’t take space from those of us who just want to send money to someone.