Other projects outside of bitcoin have used value based mechanisms for combatting spam FOR YEARS

this is well known in the developer community

Currently people use witness data at a discount

The way to combat spam is make it costly

The problem with the PR as is is that it introduces extreme hardware constraints

So you have an entire community of people (aside from projects like libbitcoin) ignoring the real existential crisis, layering the conversation with dense technical word salad, all while ignoring where real bloat comes from at a discount

Forcing people to use the op_return makes it costly to spam

Bitcoin is a value based system and value based systems depend on hard coded value mechanisms to defend the network

Things like Standardness (policy) were created as short term mechanisms to reduce load until we have better solutions