I think people were expecting too much from the London hardfork implemented on the Ethereum blockchain on August 5, 2021. They though the transaction fees would be very low, and they would send cheap ETH transfers and swap ERC20 tokens on DEXes.

In fact, Ethereum miners are now earning little money from transaction fees that exceed the base fee per gas. However, they are interested in burning as many ETH coins as possible in order to make the supply more scarce on cryptocurrency exchanges. The whales will also likely try to add deflation blocks burning more than 2 ETH in order to publicly report about the useful feature introduced recently.

In such a situation, I guess the transaction fees will remain quite high in the near future.