UTXO bloat causes nodes to need more RAM. Pruning doesn’t help. It’s caused by an increase in the number of small amounts of sats. Arbitrary data that gets stored on the blockchain causes nodes to need more hard drive space. Many nodes are running on hardware that can’t be upgraded to accommodate that. That increases the cost to node runners while miners profit from non financial transactions that would otherwise be filtered. 40 bytes of op_return is enough to run a side chain and it’s prunable. There’s no reason to expand it or not implement filters unless you’re just trying to accommodate shitcoiners and spammers. Bitcoin is a database but it’s for a specific purpose. Just because you can create non standard 1sat transactions and fill a block with a jpeg doesn’t mean it’s ok as long as you pay a fee. That’s not a transaction, that’s an attack. Developers want to build on Bitcoin because of the name recognition and price but if it gets turned into an altcoin it will ultimately fail. Bitcoin Core should be countering attacks not catering to them. If that’s the course they’re taking then they should just work on a altcoin and stop pretending there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it.