I made a 1 sat byte transaction 16 January from my signature campaign address.
That transaction is 1.27 sat/WU, which works out to over 5 sat/vbyte.
In mempool.space the mempool is about 150mb, but I got only 70mb in mine. But it still shows up that it is possible to get a confirmation with 7 sat/byte
Well yes, because the tip of the mempool is currently around 10 sat/vbyte, but there are still 130 MB of transactions below that.
We got 2336 1-2 sat/byte transactions confirmed in the last 12 days:
And there are currently over 20,000 transactions paying 1-2 sats/vbyte in the mempool, and several thousands more which will have been dropped over the last 12 days. Sure, a handful of low fee transactions will confirm because miners choose to include them (perhaps they have paid privately, or perhaps they have been boosted via CPFP, or perhaps they are the miners' own transactions, or that of their friends/associates, and so on), but most will sit unconfirmed until they are dropped from the mempool.
I prefer just to wait until the mempool is empty to do my consolidating.