Your last point is basically what Spectre v1 mitigations are all about, at least if you throw in the word "speculation" somehow. The rule is: don't speculate pa

Your last point is basically what Spectre v1 mitigations are all about, at least if you throw in the word "speculation" somehow. The rule is: don't speculate past branches that depend on untrusted data (though there are certain additional considerations about what the speculated code would actually do). It's just that there are a lot of branches that don't depend on untrusted data. Speculatively executing past them is perfectly fine and extremely valuable for performance. That's why nobody wants to get rid of speculative execution.