I have already spent a lot of time to reload this topic back to my brain so I can answer you because you have interesting bio, so hear me out :D.
This topic is bot extremely difficult for newcomers and not so difficult/boring for old timers. That's why most of serious people maybe say something once and then move on.
There are also several people who have built their influencer status on pushing this topic especially to "left curve" bitcoiners and newcomers.
This makes it super annoying to people trying to do something in Bitcoin hence the toxicity of some people on "core side".
The facts in no particular order:
1. We already have spam mitigation, it is block size and fee market. If monetary transactions can't out price spam in long term, Bitcoin is useless. Nothing more to discuss. (There are some real concerns here like rich US boys paying ridiculous fees for their rare monkey pushing global south to tether on tron, but rare monkeys are temporary and already dead)
2. There is no way to define and filter spam of people willing to pay for it in decentralized way. It is literally impossible based on information theory. There are mamy ways to put arbitrary data to Bitcoin blocks and there is no way to know if transaction contains some data. There are some mitigations that can be done but there are always ways around those mitigations.
3. I personally find knots talking points disingenuous and misleading. They started this war because of OP_RETURN policy change.
a) it was always possible to use big OP_RETURN because it is consensus valid since always.
b) nobody is even using OP_RETURN for spam because there is much more fee-efficient ways to put MUCH larger jpegs to Bitcoin - there is a block with just one 4MB jpeg of some stupid wizard! It is done by ordinals inscriptions which put data into witeness part of block thus paying 75% less fees.
c) the "change" was just different default value in config file. Any node runner could change it before and can change it now.
d) all they were saying was "we don't want Bitcoin to change" but now they proposed hard fork - I suspect it was the plan all along
4. Knots argument is that we have to fight spam and it has to be our highest priority. We have to sacrifice everything in order to fight spam.
5. Core .. You should just listen to "Bitcoin explained" podcast episode 98 - Return of OP_RETURN , but tldr: there are technical/efficiency reasons to remove OP_RETURN limit.
6. There are hundreds of hours of podcasts you can listen to regarding this and other much more important topics, but you should not listen to some pleb slop on yt but to good stuff like:
- What Bitcoin did (Easy listening)
- Bitcoin explained (quite technical)
- nostr:nprofile1qqs2dg3dtrdkwz0gr3t3wenahm3dmwkzy3y9whdtlyh5kvxxacgjnugpzamhxue69uhky6t5vdhkjmn9wgh8xmmrd9skctcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqz9nhwden5te0v4jx2m3wdehhxarj9ekxzmny9uv9aj7n (I don't know what's going on there, but recommended)
- rabbit hole recap (the OG podcast)
- nostr:nprofile1qqs8spcgqfgzxkcnerak0t40xs8jfsecgkeywrnam3lvp4qvqp5zv3gpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctv9uq3uamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwp6kytnhv4kxcmmjv3jhytnwv46z7s4n9p6 (also good one)
- The reorg (amazing economics)
...
7. Fun fact is that Luke - the guy behind Knots - is legendary OG Bitcoin core dev that everyone hates, but everyone acknowledges he is genious and he contributed a lot to Bitcoin .. He is the one who found the way to upgrade to segwit without hardfork (and won block size wars) which introduced witness discount and also enabled taproot upgrade which (together with witness discount) enabled ordinals and inscriptions which flooded Bitcoin with spam jpegs which he now is on crusade against ..
8. No we don't want hard fork. Hard fork is how altcoins are created ..