Categorical and ordinal feature data representation in regression analysis?
The distinction between ordinal and categorical does matter. If in truth the difference between white and red was drastically different from red and black, your (10,20,30) ordinal model would not have performed well.

One hot encoding can learn the relationship between the ordinal values more finely, but throws out the information that the variables are related. Similarly, with insufficient data it is more likely to overfit.

Ordinal variables lessen those  problems but at the cost of forcing you to define the interval. There are a number of methods for defining the values of your ordinal variables, like rologit.