While most Bitcoin Core contributors do not seem particularly excited about ordinals, inscriptions, runes, or similar projects, most of them appear to agree that the ability to embed data in the Bitcoin blockchain is a product of other characteristics of the Bitcoin network such as censorship resistance and a flexible scripting system.

Fighting "spam" transactions at the mempool policy level is ineffective, especially when such transactions have spent over $280M in transaction fees in the past two years which translates to plenty of financial incentive for mining pools to accept such (consensus-valid!) transactions out-of-band to pad their revenue.

The only way to properly make inroads on curbing spam would be to soft fork out the spam mechanisms. However, even going back to a small amount of whitelisted output script templates would not prevent data payloads in fake pubkeys or fake public key hashes, signatures per grinding, or other transaction fields that can hold arbitrary data.

When inscriptions were discussed as a concern for the Bitcoin network at a Bitcoin Core contributor meeting, the prevalent position was that making this quixotic fight the main priority of the project was not the best use of the project’s limited resources.