Yes, in 2017 bitcoin block limit was replaced with a larger weight limit, but "discounted price" is nonsense: fees aren't priced by the protocol. Each block has a limit of 4 million, each transaction uses some amount of the limit and offers some fee. Income maximizing behavior by miners is to fill the block up with as much fees as they can fit within the limit which (if you ignore transaction dependencies and end packing) is accomplished by dividing fees by capacity usage and sorting. Taproot didn't change anything with respect to that, which you can easily verify for yourself by grabbing a copy of Bitcoin from (say) 2019 and observing that it accepts the same transactions. I'm quite confused as to why anyone is bringing up taproot other than that it was the most recent consensus change, but it didn't and couldn't have added any means to add more data because it strictly reduced the set of blocks considered valid (and didn't use the segwit technique of adding a new field to transactions to escape the prior limits). I could offer some cynical guesses, but I doubt they'd advance the discussion.
I'd happily agree these things are not particularly relevant, but you brought them up and stated them falsely.
The rest of your posts continues with the false claims "These same developers block attempts to increase the block size in Bitcoin" -- yet your own post admits blocks can now be 4MB, it was increased. Of course, absolutely zero evidence for your 'block attempts to increase' when your own post contradicts it! lol
> You are arguing about intent
Quite the opposite: "Unless you are referring to increasing the capacity of blocks back in 2017, no change to the consensus rules that allowed larger transactions has happened. You can easily verify this for yourself by starting up an older copy of Bitcoin and observe that it accepts everything fine."
The offense at 'in support of "BRC-20" tokens' isn't even a question of intent, it's a casual impossibility. Bitcoin's capacity increase was in 2017. Taproot (which isn't relevant, but lets ignore that) was designed in 2019-- these things couldn't have been done in support of BRC-20 which is a few months old. Nor would they have needed to, since the BRC-20 data is 89 bytes, people had no problem embedding files tens of kilobytes in size secretly in transactions many years ago.
> I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away
I don't see how that's actually disputable. We already know who's funding it, it's funded by Calvin Ayre as the people engaging in it have openly disclosed. ...Unless you want to dispute that Ayre is an adversary! :D Exactly why is a total guessing game, I doubt there is only a single reason.