When the limit was placed on OP_RETURN it didn't cause any issues nor did it push people into using workarounds.
It did, actually. But the
workarounds were trivial to accomplish, and the limit was reverted in 2015.
So why is Ordinals Attack different all of a sudden?!!
Because its not an attack, just like Counterparty wasn't an attack. You are mired in confusion because you continue to mislabel it as an attack. Once you accept its not an attack, then the situation may begin to make more sense.
In any case I still don't think it is too late. If the majority of nodes start rejecting this type of spam attack (like some of us do) they won't reach a mining pool to be mined.
Due to the nature of economic incentives and capitalism, this will never happen.