Needs to be increased is tricky. The natural and necessary state for blocks is nearly full; defining need is hard. "Near-universally agreed to be good to increase" would be better, but people are sensibly worried that it would be held back by unreasonable people and so they are unwilling to take that risk.
The essence of Bitcoin's current problem can be found in this post. The problem isn't the words that I emphasized. It's that a core developer made such a statement.
It is absurd that any real-time system "needs" to run near saturation. This is so elementary it is hard to believe that a competent system designer would make such a statement. It is no wonder that some people are questioning motivation rather than technical judgment.