I think you should reconsider: A) whether or not empty blocks are a sign of a healthy or a suboptimal condition B) whether or not non-monetary transactions would be driven out by the desirable monetary transactions

If we take you on your word, as a good faith actor, that core contributors are not overly influenced by the market for putting graffiti and smut on the bitcoin blockchain, neither of these positions seem well-founded as far as I can tell.

We're at all time highs in hashrate in the context of incumbent governing systems that are both powerful and hostile to bitcoin as a medium of exchange, but the transition from SoV to MoE doesn't have to slow and incremental. It is more likely to be like a dam breaking, and if not we are decades away from it being problematic given the quantity of bitcoin mining hardware that has already been manufactured, even if hashing innovation were to stop tomorrow and miners competed on energy cost alone.

The desire to force a fee market is frankly impatient hand-ringing dressed up in a veneer of technical acumen.

On the second point, entire networks, such as Steemit (now Hive) found traction by putting content on a Blockchain. It seems in principle that Bitcoin's robustness, immutability, and market dominance in terms of crypto mindshare that makes it an attractive place to put permanent multimedia content, and that this demand will always outstrip monetary demand for block space if hostility towards it by system design and policy defaults are not upheld. Why wouldn't someone construct a new kind of Steemit on lightning, then "settle" all of the text every 10 minutes, taking up the entire block to create an immutable Twitter? Why would that commentary necessarily be low value junk, maybe the scarcity of block space creates a popularity contest, where someone ports a qualitative voting system onto the chain, that starts to scale as only the highest voted messages get added to the chain. Why is that inherently less valuable than monetary transactions? And on the other side, why would content that is chased off all other communication media, like promulgators of CSAM or other contraband, not wish to use our monetary media just to stain it?

It seems to me that the unfounded fee market anxiety generates a need to feel like block space has a base layer of demand that is not monetary, and that this is both the root of the fatalism about spam and the (unnecessary) cope that monetary transactions will outbid content transactions, but there is no evidence for free latter, it's just a baseless assertion that has taken root in a closed circle of core developers who refuse to listen to anyone outside the clique.

You don't have to be fatalistic about spam, because the fee market doesn't need to be forced, we don't need a base layer of non-monetary demand for block space, and spam doesn't need to be deterministically solved to be inhibited by an ongoing pursuit of memepool hygiene.

Let the spammers collude with miners directly, because then nodes can spin up their filters and force a cost egregious abuse based upon the level of spam through the risk of orphaned blocks.