Well, I'd agree that is a lot more spam than would be desirable. And the
overall traffic level is low enough that the level of spam is significant
as compared to the total number of messages.
For example, if I look at the last 25 threads in my newsreader, 13 of them
are spam. So, by that metric spam is half the topics in the newsgroup.
I guess it just depends on one's definition of "a lot". There's less spam
here than, for example, in the Java newsgroup. But there are many fewer
real messages here as well.