Well they tried it, we didn't like it, and in the end they stopped... I don't see so much garbage anymore in blocks and considering the empty mempools recently I would say that it's ok now?

All I’d say is just take your time and watch this from start to finish. It will answer probably all of your questions:

Oh wow, I didn't know all this was going on in the background... It's a bit scary when Bitcoin Core devs behave this way. At least I know what to look out for when updating my node...

Mechanic and a bunch of others have been going at it with the spammers for two years straight. Now it’s all coming down to this.

Right, I paid attention to it when the inscriptions started but I ignored the op_return stuff... I am happy now to be running Knots, which I installed for being able to solo mine through my own Datum server, but now I understand it's so much more important than that, and we need to bring more node runners to run Knots..!