We, the users.
No, we do not. We never did. This is not a majority-decides-what-to-censor type of network, it is a censorship resistant. End of story. I do not care about any transaction beyond mine.
Bitcoin wasn't created to make some abstract "transactions", it was created to transfer monetary value, not some made-up tokens.
What is the big deal with allowing a fraction of the block space to be used for abstract transactions? You are not paying for them. You are just keeping them in your disk space, like the rest of the transactions.
Centralized exchanges and other entities are a natural part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, so it's not a spam.
How was it called in the whitepaper? Peer-to-peer something.