Taproot is useful for many things and increases privacy for on-chain transactions. These same primitives that power inscriptions are also used for Taro, which enables stable coins on Lightning Network.

Also, Bitcoin is a permission-less network. So you may think these transactions are worthless, but to someone else, they are clearly not.

If Bitcoin dies because of JPEGS, it was never going to win. Also inscriptions may provide a price floor for transactions, but they will not compete seriously with movement of money in terms of sats/vbyte.

Also, fee rate pressure may push more into Lightning Network and encourage further expansion of this tech, which will be necessary if we hope to scale Bitcoin globally. Blockspace is insufficient for most people to use Bitcoin on-chain in a hyperbitcoinized world. This was already true before taproot and inscriptions.