From the perspective of a regular, non-ordinal user, ordinal transactions are merely inefficient in terms of block space. That is, they transfer sats (as all transactions do), but use more block space than necessary to do it.

But while those transactions are inefficient in space terms, they must be efficient in fee terms. That is, they must outbid other transactions for miners to pick them up.

It MUST be the case that outbidding competitors is sufficient to get your valid transaction included. It is by this mechanism that censored parties can disincentivize would-be censors.

We are all counting on ordinals succeeding. If the network manages to censor ordinal transactions (while still admitting that those transactions are valid) then the network could just as well censor other valid transactions for other reasons—e.g. Big Brother forbids non-KYC coin, etc.