And for example, given that Taproot was implemented without a hard fork being required, a patch could be pushed to disable certain OP codes until they can be re-implemented later with proper spam filtering.
Do you understand implication of disabling opcodes used by ordinals? Ordinals use OP_PUSHDATA and OP_PUSHBYTES which is used for various thing such as multi-signature and HTLC for Lightning Network. Your suggestion would kill Bitcoin popularity.
Wasn't there a debate or analysis that we'd need to increase block size 1MB every 4 years or so?
I don't recall any BIP which suggest to increae maximum block size by 1MB every 4 year.