"This too shall pass!" to quote Neel Kolhatkar.

The only real similar precedent for this was the Satoshi dice spam, which was one of the driving reasons for tx older than 120 confirms no longer being fee free being dropped as a concept. There was a very clear distinction between fee paying and non fee paying SatoshiDice tx with the non fee paying ones clearly being spam imo.

This might take a while longer though and could possibly lead to more lightning adoption and/or larger blocks. What really surprises me about this is that it wasn't preempted people have been dumping random crap onto the chain for ages, 2010 dickpics etc etc etc.

However, some form of resolution of this needs to happen fairly quickly or Bitcoin will loose the ground it has gained in El Salvador and much of the rest of Latin America where current fee levels are completely unsustainable for people using BTC as part of their daily lives.

Personally I would like to see the lightning peeps get their fingers out and get better ATM and POS support for less, this will mitigate some of the issues though not fix all of them. There are a bunch of older BIPs that might also potentially be of use for finding a more elegant long term solution.