If it wasn't spam, but a genuine onboarding process of new users, these discussions and ideas wouldn't need to exist. The only ideas that would be valid would be ways of scaling.
That's the thing though: these are new users being onboarded, and they are "genuine" as far as the network is concerned. Until all miners collectively decide to reject their transactions (which will never happen), Ordinals (and now Runes) users can't be stopped.
I guarantee these are still just passing fads though and nobody will care nearly as much about them a year from now. They will have just left a lot of blockchain bloat in their wake, and there's no way to stop it.