However, I will suffer ordinals and I will pay higher fees if this is the price to keep bitcoin as freedom money and stop a small group of people censoring transactions they do not agree with. Bitcoin as a concept is far more important than the personal inconvenience of higher fees.
To be fair the preventive measure discussed here and also what I've suggested from day one has been "standard rules" not "consensus rules". Meaning it wouldn't make Ordinals exploit invalid, it would only make it non-standard which means it still can NOT be censorship if the community is deciding to enforce these rules on the full node they run.
The problem is that despite the length of time that has passed we haven't seen the option to reject Ordinals type spam in full node implementations (except the very recent Knots thing in OP) so the community never had that "choice".
First that choice has to be added to the implementations then those who don't want to see this spam would start activating that option and reject the spam txs and those who want to see this spam would start running nodes and relay the garbage!
That's how Bitcoin should always work.