Refusing to relay non-standard, abusing, exploitive, spam, etc. type transactions is never called "censoring" and full nodes have always been rejecting such transactions from very early days.

Fee increase and decrease is not purely only supply and demand game. Ordinals creators were artificially increasing the fee for some reason, they were paying more than it was necessary to get transaction confirmed in the next block, they were paying hundreds of times more than it was necessary and some regular Bitcoin users were just forced to pay high fees because of them.