Miners, users, Satoshi himself, did make usage of it, when there was surplus in block capacity.
The protocol is slightly flexible in some places where it can be used like that. For example when Satoshi inserted that text in the coinbase of Genesis block. But it is both within the rules without any exploitation and also it is very limited to 100 bytes.
You can't even begin to compare that with the Ordinals Attack that is both exploiting the protocol and injecting as much data as they can into the blocks with basically no limit apart from the block size.
But honestly, let's assume you censor -or as you call it "fix the exploit"- and make Ordinal transactions invalid; what if they adopt another encoding scheme, which wasn't "exploited", like OP_RETURN? What then? You'll soft fork and make OP_RETURN with data_size >= x invalid? What if they switch to completely indistinguishable monetary transactions? That's right. What if they send 0 coins to plethora of 256-bit addresses? Until when will you scrutinize other people's transactions to enforce your Bitcoin ideals?
What you are forgetting is that we've already done all of that! There is a limit on everything to keep spams like Ordinals out. It has been like this forever. OP_RETURN size is limited. Every output size is also limited to standard outputs (P2PKH, P2SH, etc.) witness sizes (for version 0) are limited, stack item sizes are limited, transaction sizes used to be limited, and a lot more that I have iterated too many times in this topic!
Nobody has ever complained about preventing spam for 14 years until the Ordinals Attack appeared which is pretty weird to me if I'm honest with you.
But, when these ideas were raised, no one took issue with it. I don't recall anyone at that point in time saying "No, Bitcoin is just for money" and that it can't be anything else.
They did take issue with it from day one, and by they I include Satoshi himself. For example by principle the BitDNS project was like Ordinals, storing data on bitcoin blockchain:
Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.
Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other. BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.
This is not the only time either. Ethereum was also supposed to be as part of Bitcoin and we all know how that ended up.
We also didn't sit idly by just rejecting everything anybody proposes, other better solutions were proposed. For example for BitDNS the NameCoin as a separate cryptocurrency was created. For turing complete smart contracts the Ethereum was created. Even to help these smaller projects not to have a weak security things like merge mining were invented.
And a lot more including the existing bitcoin side-chain projects.
My hope is merely that the silly-picture-brigade loses momentum and people go back to looking at the more "legitimate" use-cases regarding property rights and such.
The problem doesn't lie in the content at all. After all BitDNS idea was cool and useful too and yet it shouldn't have happened
on bitcoin blockchain because the problem is that they are trying to swat a fly using a sledgehammer.