Seriously, good riddance. It added so much clutter to videos that I explicitly hid them any chance I got. I'd rather content creators just use the video description to communicate or edit their videos so that annotations would not be necessary.
In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too.
And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with their youtube videos providing corrections and such via the description is entirely untenable.
I'm sorry you've only seen spam, but cutting off another's tool because some people can't use it correctly is a severe case of FYGM.
I don't think they should take it away completely, just limit it so avoid the aforementioned 'myspace page' overuse.