Rationalizing this as a scheme that is "cooked up" is failure to recognize that people are genuinely concerned about spam and the op_return fiasco. My pruned snapshot from 2023 is 5 gb and is now 12 gb. The spam debate is real, grassroots, and node runners have the right to be concerned and take whatever action is needed when the conventional maintainers are derelict in their duty to protect node runner interests. We need UTXO combining and every wallet a node or able to connect to a trusted node. Spam is taking us away from that goal.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dYA9vYa0iwQ