But where was the "abuse"? They paid for the same transaction fees that they were willing to pay like any other user who would want his/her transaction to be in the next block, or next to the next block.
Well, blockchain data spammers exploit the possibility to cram their stuff into witness data which is heavily discounted. In my opinion it's fair to say they abuse this loophole because they don't pay the same fee per byte for their data stuff as when it had to be put e.g. into OP_RETURN outputs.
Every byte of non-witness data has a weight of 4WU, but every byte of witness data has only a weight of 1WU assigned and valid blocks can have nearly upto 4,000,000WU. Blockchain data spammers thus exploit a discount of 75% for their monkey, pepe or whatever shit they showel into witness data.
Of course, at the moment any data spammer can exploit this loophole, regardless of silly pics inscriptions or whatever other data they burden the blockchain with.
It's merely users not liking how other users use Bitcoin.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You're right and you probably guessed it, I don't like this, too. Satoshi Nakamoto didn't like it, either. I'm now a bit too lazy to find the reference but Satoshi expressed pretty clearly his dislike to put data into the blockchain that isn't needed to move bitcoins in "normal" transactions.
Because you can do it in current implementation of Bitcoin doesn't make it right. But that's likely always something subjective. And in high times of data spamming we've seen the consequences for everybody. Maybe only the miners were happy, because mempool congestion plays into their favor.
