Sidechain and other L2 already exist far before Ordinals created. But almost no one use it despite both Liquid network and Rootstock have smart contract capability and developer behind it promote it support NFT/token. I also have seen Ordinals supporters say they only want to use Ordinals since their arbitrary data guaranteed to be immutable.
I think I adequately explained why the NFT bullshit doesn't use alternatives (I mean forget sidechains, they could just spin up another blockchain or use bcash or whatever). If it wasn't clear you can ask questions.
Of course, there is also always the potential for collateral motivations but if you pick through them the most likely sound like ones trying to divide up the Bitcoin community, or trying to prove out points of control or that transaction censorship works. ... but you don't need alternative motivations to explain the shitcoining, it's just that even when one is sufficient others can be true too.
and, yet again, nft shitcoining stuff is mostly orthogonal to opreturn. If it wanted to use outputs it would just be using fake outputs.
and it's only because the core devs didn't act when they should have acted!
I think that's debatable at best, but if they had it would have been a huge drama fire-- and the failure of the community to manage that drama fire is a huge pressure to NOT do it. So here again we see a huge drama fire and this one is over a real nothing burger. You're not sending a message that they *can* act. If you want to send that message you should help douse dramafires.
I care about this opreturn issue because:
1. The block propagation problem needs to get fixed and this is one of the (nearly) required steps. (I say nearly because the alternative is some massive rocket science improvement in block propagation that the project is not healthy enough to undertake, and which still won't do as good a job as fixing relay to relay everything that gets mined).
2. That people are bashing the shit out of bitcoin core over a PR that wasn't even initiated by a regular contributor, that rightfully should have been done a year ago but likely got delayed because of not wanting to deal with drama. ... so people leaving core out to dry is resulting in them not putting out their best effort. The bitcoin project feeling free to make controversial changes which they believe are correct would have been an absolute prerequisite to them doing something about the NFT-shitcoin spam. (I don't believe they would have for fact specific reasons, but it would have at least required feeling able to do so).
3. The influencers who are outright lying to the public[1] should not gain a win from this and validate their manipulation techniques.
[1] Like saying "core did this" and "core ignored the community" basically the moment a project outsider made a PR. Like telling people that they're taking away the choice, without mentioning that there is another PR that keeps the option or mentioning that since miners don't enforce the limit, that it is ineffectual at blocking spam (See also: 3183bd6ceebc2d39c0a3cfa0d06eb84d1161eaac1c26605e2eab62bfe48c1420 ). Like lying to people and saying that core contributors want NFT garbage when the tech people hate that stuff, have expressly said they don't like it. In reality the change is popularly supported among those in the know because this filter no longer works (see also my see also above) and it causes collateral harm, and the NFT garbage encodes their data a different and unrelated way. And so on. All these things are just outright lies and inexcusable omissions and they are poisoning public discussion. And the people making them are just getting away with it.