Second , if no rules are broken why is it attack ?
The same reason why sending a million requests to a website's server per second is not technically breaking any rules but it is an attack.
For more than 6 months that fees were low and inscriptions were made most btc'ers were mocking and no one was talking about an attack . Now that it affects their pockets it has become one ?
Just because
you haven't seen it, that doesn't mean it didn't exist. We've been discussing this attack from the day it was created. Obviously regular users who don't deal with Bitcoin every day may not even be aware of the attack taking place and only find out about it when the severity of it has grown enough to affect them.
It's like that website that was being DDoS attacked for months but
you only visited it after months to face the problems.