Categorizing what is spam and what is not is pretty subjective, i am sure those who paid 500 sats for a BRC-20 transaction do not think it was spam.
One could even argue that
someone who's willing to pay $34 to send $0.15 can't be a spammer. "Normally", spam only works because it's very cheap to send in massive amounts. This blockchain-spam is quite unique. So this guy paying so much must have a very good reason for it. Or at least that's what he thinks....
One more thing worth mentioning is that the pace of finding blocks has been 6% slower than average, today it picked up to 2% which means more blocks are found per day, this should greatly reduce the fee base.
I don't think a few percent is going to help, and I'm pretty sure they'd also fill it if blocks were 4 times bigger. It would just take a bit longer.
Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.
I would have no problem with the first example, but the second one isn't good enough. People in some countries would be happy if they earned $200 in a full month of work, and paying $20 in fees would be a small fortune for them. Unacceptable, unless the future of Bitcoin is to be used by the rich and those in the Western nations.
I live in a Western country, and I find $20 per transaction outrageous too. I make a couple dozen fiat payments per month, and can't do that in Bitcoin at this price. It means on-chain Bitcoin can't be used as a payment system for the masses (but we knew that already).