It's well established that these types of tokens are exploiting certain features that Taproot and SegWit have to upload data on the blockchain that wasn't meant to be there. It's fitting to the definition of a bug because this is very far from intended functionality.
In the case of Runes, this is not correct. Runes uses a quite old mechanism: OP_RETURN. It was introduced already by Satoshi, but made standard in v0.9 (in 2014) just to allow data to be stored in a way the rest of the users and nodes are affected the less possible.
Why was it introduced? Because in 2013/14, a lot of token and NFT mechanisms were created which used other techniques, like encoding the data in a fake public key. This is still possible, and in fact this is the way
Stampchain SRC-20 and
Doginals (on Dogecoin, which uses old Bitcoin code) work. In these olden days token systems like Mastercoin (now Omni) didn't create that much of a fee spike than Runes/Ordinals do nowadays. But the reason why it was seen as harmful is that it introduces UTXOs which will never be spent, and these UTXOs have to be kept in memory by the nodes.
Basically, devs realized that there was no way to prevent arbitrary data being stored on the blockchain. So they "legalized" a way which makes it less harmful. OP_RETURN outputs can be safely pruned by full nodes.
So
technically, Runes is an "ok" technology, very much contrasting with BRC-20 which
is harmful because of its inefficient mechanism leading to excessive bloat, and hopefully died now.
But the economic model of tokens which are first "etched" by somebody, then "minted" by anyone, and then should accrue some kind of value? That's really Fantasialand, worse than memecoins and other altcoin stuff, and that's why I'm making fun of those people here in the thread
Any "token" built on top of bitcoin's current on-chain infrastructure will eventually be worthless.
Here you could be right. At least there are already
techniques being developed to validate the chain without having to store everything, and thus being able to provide a complete "full node" in a pruned state, deleting most of the data items/tokens on the chain. "Token lovers" would then have to reccur on archival nodes, which for several reasons (e.g. legal risk) will probably not be free to use. This should make the whole token business unviable in the long term, at least on Bitcoin.