it also showed is that there's a huge amount of dormant capital that was waiting for something like Ordinals to happen.
Unless we can find some solid evidence of the origin of the funds that went into these junks we can't call it "dormant capital". I'd say there are two main sources for the funds that pumped Ordinal's fake tokens: (1) dedicated money to attack Bitcoin (2) the same old altcoin/token traders who take their capital from shitcoin to shitcoin every single day to make profit. Like this:
https://www.coingecko.com/en/all-cryptocurrencies?sort_by=change24h