It got a discount to allow for the cheaper batching of transactions. My understanding is that transactions to and from exchanges... needed to be cheaper and a 'compromise' needed to be found. So... the witness discount allowed cheaper batched transactions (with exchanges or otherwise) plus anything to do with Lightning which is inevitable for scaling to happen anyway.

That's why the discount. IMO the current bout of spam will pass, people will get bored and move on, people will 'waste their sats' on nonsense get-rich-quick crypto schemes... and the people using Bitcoin 'as money' (which not enough people are doing anyway see the fees) will be fine. People gambling their sats on memecoins... will have fewer of them, run out, and get bored. The end.

Anything else is noise in my opinion.