A question: Was Taproot activated in Namecoin?
The reason I ask is because in theory Namecoin would be the ideal place for the
Ordinals project and above all their Inscription feature ("save art on the blockchain"). It's a chain which always was linked to unique things (names, identities, domains ...) and thus the NFT concept would be a good fit, or not? Ordinals would need Taproot to work, although a similar feature could perhaps be built with OP_RETURN if the limit isn't too low on NMC.
It is not, but I think there are no important objections. It just needs to be scheduled and coordinated with miners. (And due to a conflict with merge mining, versionbits is not working on Namecoin (yet), so the activation code itself would have to be modified to be based on a block height or timestamp, but that is of course not a big issue.) I expect that it will be activated sooner or later, just like Segwit was.
Your point about ordinals is a very interesting one.