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When I look through your drawbacks there is only one that I find slightly compelling and it is that the hire could reduce the quality of researchers, but you've already admitted that to offer a spousal hire the university is at least landing one researcher who is above the caliber they would normally hire. What are the odds that their partner is sufficiently below average to drag the level of the university down?
The others such as someone feeling like it's unfair... well, whoever you hire that will be side effect so it hardly matters. Drama? Once more, drama will make itself. I doubt spousal hires move it much off of baseline.
At the end of the day, the university is trying to win in a market and spousal hires are what the marketplace demands. Most research is fake anyway, so why does it matter if research money is going to a superstar liar or a mediocre one?
The puzzles you offer to sharpen our intuition just further demonstrate that it's just a market problem. The answer to almost all of them is "is the demand for the candidate sufficient to justify this expense". That expense of course also includes setting a new norm and injuring the feelings of those to whom one would not offer these various forms of compensation. As norms can be slow to change, I doubt that these would happen quickly, but if they do I'm not concerned. If the researcher is getting his daughter hired at a university it just demonstrates he's being a protective father who puts his family first, and I'd like to see us back in a place where this is normalized and celebrated anyway.
Yes, for the university it is probably a net improvement (at least in terms of prestige). But for the field as a whole or for the broader society, it may not be.
Maybe? Difficult-to-impossible to model this. It's basically an intuition or supposition. I'd rather top talent (insofar as it exists in academia, which I mostly find doubtful) get rewarded. Not all that worried if a mediocre psychology adjunct gets displaced by the wife of a brilliant researcher, even if that's her only qualification.
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