To be fair inscriptions were already possible before you just had to split them up into multiple parts but still the point is solid. YEARS of testing is required for any bitcoin upgrade.
Discussion
Time is a component here. Dev, testing, delivery, and complexity regressions of ordinals would have been retarded by just SegWit. That would have given months, if not years, of runway for continued L2 improvements without the friction of bananas fee markets.
We need to culturally internalize the time we lost by yeeting Taproot to main
We didnt just lose time either. We now have more problems to solve. That means other problems get less focus. If the blocksize war taught us anything, it is that fee markets and blockspace scarcity become the debate du jour and sap our time and energy away from addressing other things.