The “other things” are filters. Fees have already proven ineffective against gamified spam like ordinals and inscriptions, where speculators cover the higher cost of clogging the timechain with ever-higher bids. Fees only work against the classic kind of spam - a temporary DDoS attack. And Satoshi couldn’t have predicted the SegWit witness discount, because SegWit didn’t even exist when he made that statement.
Discussion
If you start censoring certain types of data, you open up a Pandora’s Box. Just seems near impossible to start censoring arbitrary data while respecting the freedom and privacy aspects of Bitcoin. But I respect other’s opinions, part of the power of open source is having these discussions so thanks for sharing.
Fist, it’s not censorship. Second it’s being done with enormous success over the years between 2009-2023. 99.9% of the data containing txs are within the filter parameters. In 2023 a filter got exploited thanks to the taproot upgrade (unintentional consequence) and that resulted in the huge abuse of arbitrary data (spam) that we’ve seen over the past 2.5 years. If this filter was fixed back then in Core 26 or 27, like it was fixed in Knots, we wouldn’t have been having this conversation.