I keep seeing this recurring mantra in this thread, and even on the Monero Talk podcast: "If it doesn't hurt privacy, I don't care."

That is like saying "I don't care if banks print money, as long as they don't freeze my bank account." Whether you like it or not, if you don't care about one, you don't care about the other.

Spam is the most sophisticated attack on this network. It sells the fake idea of "volume" and "vitality" while actually poisoning the chain with AI slop. What does that do? It makes node operation costs unviable for everyone. Look at Ordinals and see what that cancer culminated in for BTC.

You care about privacy? I believe you, but privacy is useless in practice if the chain is so bloated that only 3 datacenters can afford to run a node.

All of this is happening because some bullshitt "project" managed to turn the tail emission into a subsidy for miners to destroy the network. That’s how you kill decentralization. I am calling on everyone to fight that cancerous plague.

this is only partially correct because it does hurt privacy. the protocol works because all txns look nearly identical; a bunch of txns with bloated tx_extra fields do not look like the other txns. this makes it notably easier for firms like Chainalysis to perform passive blockchain analysis.

there's also the bloating due to spam, as you said.

the ideological issues surrounding this are debatable, the technical ones are not, and this should be avoided for that reason.