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.
Even if you are a techy guy you seem to fail to understand that you are comparing different things . If i'm a legit user of a website i won't try to send 1 million requests per second . That's a DDos attack , and it's purpose is to take down a website and have a gain by either ransoms or financial gain for a competitor .
If 1 million customers per second were trying to use that website to buy stuff that can't be consider an attack , that website would be more than happy to upgrade it's infrastructure and maximize it's profits . Imagine if facebook or netflix or banks were calling an attack the use of their networks by millions of users . Wouldn't you laugh at them ?
That's the problem here , currently there are thousands of customers that want to use btc's chain because they see an opportunity . Btc has ruled that the ones that pay higher fees are eligible to enter their transactions faster in a block that it's capacity should be limited to be as valuable as it gets . If the fee model is flawed by default ( at least from my point of view ) then that's not making those willing to pay the price attackers . It's like the example of 1 million customers per second i gave above , the logical would be to upgrade the infrastructure . But , guys like you , now understand how wrong were they sticking to 1 MB limit and scarce block space and just try to blame others . Your magical solution of L2 doesn't work , and you're looking for enemies . What would happen if tomorrow morning 100 million users decided to use btc for their everyday needs transacting in a way proper of how you think network should work ? Would you call them attackers too ? In your sense everyone that's not using LN is an attacker , that's the problem .
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.
With that said, Ordinals is an attack because it is abusing Bitcoin which is a payment network not a cloud storage. Additionally this attack only became possible by finding and using an exploit in the protocol that was added through a past soft-fork.
As i explained above
you are the one that doesn't understand that this not an attack , it's a result of your premise that there should be a fee market and a limited scarce blocksize . You want a network that works on your needs , where full nodes decide how network will work . Well , from what i see , your full node that i guess is rejecting any "non-standard transaction" doesn't play any part on how blocks are building . Maybe it's time to understand how PoW consensus really works ?