So if we all hate ordinals so much, then why are more people not rejecting them from their nodes?
That's the point, when the software that 98.97% of the network run does not have the option to reject these transactions we can't know how many people "hate ordinals" and how many want it.
It's like wanting to vote for a soft-fork while your client doesn't support voting for it!!!
I'm sure I've seen you mention before that you reject them from your node, but you are the only person I've seen doing this until Knots.
I'm not exactly running a full node, it's more of an experimental implementation of Bitcoin which is in its early stages but can be a full node which I modified to reject these spam transactions.
Is the conclusion that node runners simply do not care and will just run whatever Core tells them to run?
I wouldn't say they don't care, it's just that they don't have any other choice.
The alternatives are either exact copy/translation of core with same behavior and no extra control for cases like this or are unpopular and insecure to use.