This was enlightening for me, thank you. I'm not technical, so forgive me if I ask something dumb, but what stops a government from spamming the UTXO set right now and kicking plebs out?
Theoretically nothing, but practically it is because there is demand for block space from “non monetary transactions. “ Witness data outbids the utxo spammers. Under a bip110 a nation state could spend around 160 million and make 16gb nodes wrecked in 6 months.