I'm seeing people mention the following:
In the future, you can manually create a second transaction with the same inputs that includes a higher fee. Doing so might get it into a block more quickly, and the original transaction would eventually get dropped afterwards for having invalid (already used) inputs.
Does anyone know if this is true? If so could I make a VERY small transaction with a fairly high fee and hope it gets the initial transaction cancelled?
Yes, and that is called
double spending which can come in handy whenever you want to revert a certain transaction, accelerate it by adding more fees or just simply want to send the coins to another address you wish.