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$100 which is already beyond comfortable reach for the majority of the world's population
$100 seems pretty reasonable as a buy in cost to censorship resistant monetary system. Or we can say it as low enough that we'll still have very widespread node adoption (if people actually want to run nodes).
It's to incentivize miners to exert the energy required to confirm a transaction.
Excellent. The reason this works is because any valid transaction can compete in this fee market. I don't believe anyone who dislikes spam has come remotely close to acknowledging the risk posed by flippantly claiming some valid transactions are not real bitcoin transactions.
they can flood the chain at a cost that bears no relationship to the burden they impose on node operators who receive nothing and store everything.
Node runners can only have a selfish incentive. It seems that you think that the incentive to run a node is not worth the effort. I would recommend in this case that you stop using the coin if this is how you see things. Perhaps some other coin is more suited to your needs.
What I can't grasp is how you can consider this anything close to a coherent reply. There's absolutely no rigor. You've drawn a distinction without defining either side of it. Difficult by what measure? Affordability? A 2TB SSD costs roughly $100 which is already beyond comfortable reach for the majority of the world's population. If that's the current hardware requirement for IBD, the threshold has already been crossed by any reasonable standard. The distinction you're gesturing at collapses under the simplest scrutiny.
Surely it's to legitimize spam. No wait, that's not it. It's to incentivize miners to exert the energy required to confirm a transaction. But spammers perverted the intention behind the segwit discount and now they can flood the chain at a cost that bears no relationship to the burden they impose on node operators who receive nothing and store everything.