We frequently notice this behavior in main net as well, where large fees correspond to real world, hard money.
On real Bitcoin, I always assumed the data spam was meant to sell their made-up tokens to gullible people, at a profit. By my estimate, fees for data spam add up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
In here, you can fill blocks, essentially, for free. So perhaps Ordinal users, or whoever thought of a new bloating-chain idea, test their software in the new testnet4.
Maybe.
I still don't understand why people give value to large sums of the testnet4
My guess is speculation on a future price increase. Compared to the fees spent on on-chain Bitcoin data spam, this is cheap.
what we can do to disincentivize this activity.
I'm starting to think it's futile.