Determining whether it is an 'attack' poses a challenging assessment. However, what is not difficult to assess is that it involves a mix of use cases. It is very difficult to optimize for multiple use cases simultaneously. The desired use case for many in BTC is secure, uncensorable, and well-distributed wealth storage. Ordinals work against this goal by attempting to use BTC for a different purpose: data storage. One can endlessly argue about what BTC should be, but it's not hard to argue that these use cases are conflicting.
For instance, wealth storage using small UTXOs becomes impractical as individuals attempting to use BTC for data storage drive fee increases that surpass the value of the UTXOs storing wealth. Moreover, this ordinals augments the blockchain size, raising node costs and reducing the number of people able to run nodes, thus diminishing the distributed nature of BTC.