The protections aren't baked into the protocol because they don't account for external real world motives of nations states which could incent them to act in a "non-economic" way according to the internal rules of the Bitcoin game.
It's baked into the incentivization structure, if you prefer it worded that way. Investing hundreds of billions of dollars and years of work to place a temporary speed bump in front of Bitcoin's growth doesn't make sense.
This isn't a temporary speeedbump, it's a permanent end to proof of work mining as an investable activity (and viable sybil resistance mechanism for bitcoin).
Remember UASF? If incentives align amongst users, nodes, merchants and exchanges Bitcoin absolutely will switch to another mining algorithm and now the attacker has to start from 0.
If the attacker attempts to keep up the game of cat-and-mouse long enough they will eventually go bankrupt and will no longer be able to participate.
And this theoretical discussion completely dismisses the fact that it's nearly impossible to execute an attack like this at this stage in the game anyway.
UASF effectively became a negotiation between honest miners and fullnodes. Honest miners are incentivised to close off conflicts because it risks devaluing their future rewards. In this scenario the attacking miner is acting "non-economically" so it's nothing like UASF.
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