Well firstly, you have to determine if what is being called "spam" is actually spam.
Most of the recent debates flooding the Bitcoin community are quite hilarious because it reminds me of things I've discussed on a number of occasions in the past in relation to one of this industry's most popular concepts, “web3.”
You see, usually when web3 is discussed, you hear words like “decentralization, immutability, censorship-resistant, free speech, et cetera.”
Pick out censorship-resistant and free speech, and discuss them more extensively with these people and you eventually discover that most of them don't understand what it actually means to have a system that enables free speech and is completely censorship-resistant.
In the past, I've mentioned that most people are not really ready for a world where speech is actually free and nothing gets censored. This is because for any of these things to exist, people have to be ready to accept that things they don't like will get said and made public and they won't be able to censor or directly attack those responsible.
This is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin right now following the removal of the OP-Return limit, essentially allowing data to be stored in Bitcoin transactions more efficiently.
Some Bitcoiners are mad about this because to them, Bitcoin should just be a cash system and nothing more. It's actually quite funny because before “BTC” is mined through a validated block, Bitcoin is just a blockchain where data passes through various nodes and gets stored for future reference.
To make a point early on here before going further, you simply cannot claim to be a censorship-resistant network, and an advocate of freedom whilst labeling very specific transaction types as “spam” and going about saying dumb things like “spam” filtering isn't censorship.
What even constitutes spam?
Generally, as per chatGPT, spam is unsolicited, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, or just annoying people.
Judging by this definition, if I somehow attach a cat's picture in a Bitcoin transaction and send it over to a friend, it's not spam because that's very normal and acceptable behavior amongst friends, no?
You can immediately see how spam filtering, in the way that it's been approached by bitcoiners, is in-fact censorship because to begin with, they are in no position to decide what spam is because every bitcoin transaction has a recipient and it's not the nodes. Only a recipient can determine if a transaction they received was spam or not.
The roles of the nodes(miners) is to validate the existence of one or more UXTOs, ensure that rightful owners signed the txs, validate the inclusion of appropriate fees and generally adherence to all Bitcoin's consensus rules.
Filtering out transactions is censorship because it prevents individuals from passing data across the network that was supposed to be permissionless.
When we consider that finance and social networks will inevitably become more connected, it only makes sense that crypto transactions will become primarily data vehicles as those will be the most effective way to build truly sovereign communication systems for the world.
What Bitcoiners want with the OP-Return limit is censorship, albeit not a very good one because even before the limit was removed, the network was still being used to validate and store data outside the intended “monetary use cases.”
The Bitcoin community's stupid hate for Ethereum and the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystems is the primary reason this simple, non-consensus layer adjustment is causing so much divide. It isn't about stopping spam or network attacks, fees can conveniently do that, it's just about stopping people from using bitcoin for more than just regular monetary transactions.