And I wonder what "other things" Satoshi wanted to do in case of spamming the blockchain.
There are a lot of ways in Bitcoin protocol that we don't "ban" something but make it more "expensive" as a discouragement for abuse or misuse. For example I recently answered a question about a rejected block, and that case was increasing the cost of sigops by 80 to discourage using P2MS, that is an example of making something "undesirable" more expensive hence discourage it.