The person who inscribed this ugly image is probably pretty smart and business-oriented, he got his hand on an old "satoshi", attached an ugly image to it and will probably sell it for a few 10x profit to some greedy person who thinks they would be able to sell it for 5x to the next person and the chain keeps on building until the last person realizes that nobody wants to buy his expensive shit, or maybe not!.
That is the problem with these types of
collectors items they do not really have much value. The value being artificially placed on them is by investors that have already paid a premium to get it in the first place and they are now hoping for others to add a premium and buy it from them. As you stated, they do it with the intention the chain will keep building until/unless the last person realises nobody wants to buy.
Call it virtual art or anything else but it does not sound too dissimilar from how a ponzi scheme works.
This is really going beyond the acceptable limit now. These ordinals are jamming the network with nonsense NFT tokens and common users like us are paying between 40 - 70 Sats/Vbyte. This is not sustainable and might kill the usage of bitcoin as a payment processor completely. This will effectively discourage people from using Bitcoin for micropayments.
I know a discussion has been initiated between Devs but not sure how far it has reached. These ordinals need to stop for greater good.
We all saw what happened with the transaction fees becoming painfully expensive at times but it is something we will have to endure because so-called ordinals will continue (for the time being at least). The biggest losers in this battle for transaction fees will be those that want to make micropayments, as you stated it will discourage people from using Bitcoin.