... I do think there is still some level of attack going on the network causing the slow down we are experiencing today.
I suspect some miners are gaming the system by making spam transactions that fill the lower
fee tiers (e.g. sub 50 satoshi/byte). By doing this they bloat the mempool, which causes badly programmed
wallets to provide really high fee recommendations.
Many people have no clue that they can use a custom fee and therefore are often
paying way higher fees than necessary.
These spam attacks aren´t even that expensive, because the miners collect a large share
of the transaction fees that a spam attack costs anyway.