When the limit was placed on OP_RETURN it didn't cause any issues nor did it push people into using workarounds.
Placing a limit in terms of standardness does not grant that the Ordinals will stop. If there is enough demand for it, there will be workarounds sooner or later under some other name if not Ordinals.
That's exactly what we've needed from day one and I even said it from day one too: Ordinals transactions need to become non-standard. That may not stop the attack entirely but it would reduce the spam by something like 90%.
That is utter speculation.
Despite that, when you said "reject", I understood it as "invalidate" which happens via softfork. If there indeed happens to be great demand nonetheless, your next suggestion is that I presume. Isn't it?
Nobody has been calling them "digging your own hole" all these years when we were rejecting them either.
I don't know with certainty what happened in the past. I know that currently you want to censor transactions which don't fit your ideals. In a censorship resistant network, attempting to censor someone is like digging your own hole.