The BIP110 guys are saying it is Taproot that is causing all this Spam/Junk on the bitcoin blockchain.
The Taproot upgrade enabled a convenient way to store data in the transaction witness and pay less fees due to the Segwit discount. As ABCbits already said though, there are other methods, like storing data in fake public keys (e.g.
Bitcoin Stamps).
However: The big "spam" wave in 2023-24 was caused by memecoins that used the BRC-20 standard. Memecoin transactions, in contrast to NFTs, don't occupy much space. They could have crafted also in a way to fit in a P2SH script, and then they would also have benefitted (a little bit) from the Segwit discount.
Thus, it is
false that the spam wave was caused or even facilitated by Taproot. It was a fad based on a very inefficient memecoin protocol.
If "Wall Street" was behind the spam ware they for sure would have used the "fake private key" method which cannot be filtered in any way and not that dumb BRC-20 method (seriously, they encoded a JSON text file [!!] in a way that two transactions [!!!] were needed to mint or transfer the tokens - impossible to do it worse). The BIP-110 guys can cry as long as they want, but if someone builds a memecoin standard based on the fake privkey method, it can live on Bitcoin Purity or whatever they want to call their fork and can
never be filtered
