There's a group of some of the most active Core devs who are heavily against any spam filtering, shut down any discussion about filters, and close PRs which seek to fix the spam problem.

We're seeing the attack vector play out IMO. It's always been the case that if you can capture 5 or 6 key people, you can influence the direction of Bitcoin development.

I don't know if any Core devs have been captured as such, but the culture has certainly changed (by their own admission) from one which patches exploits, to one which panders to miner earnings above all other considerations (again, by their own admission).

I think this is dangerous, and I would like to see other node implementations which give the user control over the transactions they want to propagate in the mempool gaining more market share, such as Knots.

Further, I hope more and more miners point their hashing to Ocean Mining, which gives individual miners the option to select their preferred "block template", with the option to not include any of the transactions which take advantage of the spam exploits in the block.

The bigger picture is that the developments above would add to Bitcoin's decentralisation, reduce attack vectors, and give individual users more sovereignty over their participation in the network.