“Spam will continue until consensus changes.” - I completely agree with you.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t run nodes to filter it. And yes, I also know spam flows around nodes that filter it.

I see Knots as a signal to the network that Bitcoin is money, and spam is worth fighting. If enough people run Knots, then Core devs and eventually maybe even miners will decide to join the fight against spam. Blocks that mined spam will be relayed slower by filtering nodes than blocks that didn’t mine spam because compact block propagation requires the previously filtered transactions to be re-downloaded by a node to validate the block and this propagation delay provides a small economic incentive for miners.

In a - probably unrealistically ideal - world, a few years from now we might have enough support for some consensus changes to eradicate the main hacks for embedding non-financial data. We’ll only get there if we at least try to combat spam between now and then.