Seems like the market is telling us that Bitcoin investors don't care about rising fees. If cheap fees were important to the market, it would have a discernible effect on supply and demand.

If most people are simply holding BTC as an investment, they're not even paying fees to use Bitcoin, so it doesn't matter to them. At the same time, transaction volume is generally increasing, meaning that people still find value in on-chain transactions at these fee rates. At some point, equilibrium will be found, and transaction volume will drop due to growing fees. That will naturally cause network fee rates to drop.