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The optimal solution of course is to raze academia to the ground and salt the earth so nothing can again grow in its place.
More seriously, spousal hires make a ton of sense. They provide a large benefit to the desired candidate, in exchange for a small cost to the university (i.e. the value-below-replacement of the hired spouse). So if you want to bid for a desired researcher, it makes sense to bid up in a more leveraged way rather than just making the salary offer bigger. It correspondingly makes life marginally harder for non-superstar academics who are not married to superstar academics, but I don't think there's any real public benefit (either at a societal level or an institutional level) to intervening on their behalf and preventing this type of arrangement.
I tend to think it makes more sense to think about issues in terms of their costs and benefits to the various parties rather than in terms of principles. Principles don't care how much they cost, which means they can get very expensive.
On the one hand, this but unironically. On the other hand, I agree with most of the rest of your post. I actually think the history of spousal hires didn't involve precious faculty positions. Back in the day, there just weren't as many spouses (mostly female) who were even in competition for faculty jobs. It was that your university was often in the middle of nowhere (as mentioned above), to the extent that it was nearly a "one-company town", so you just found the spouse some job that probably wasn't even very highly desired anyway (and would otherwise be filled pretty much by just who was available and willing to live/work in that area). Frankly, most companies don't care if they have some secretaries that are only 90% as productive as the maximum they could get if they spent the effort to find the most qualified candidate. A 10% better main faculty hire is wayyyy more valuable.
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