The London fork did not bring the desired GAS relief, didn't it? Remember the TIME NFT a few weeks ago? This used so much ETH-chain capacity, that the GAS nearly quadrupled.
And the priority fee design does the rest...
Well, depends how you look at it,,, gas fees are high for sure, but probably not as high as it might have been without the hard fork. But I do not use these days any other transaction other than normal spend so I would not know how NFT minting costs but I assume it is still beyond the means of most ordinary people.
Small fees is always good sounding until something bad with network security undoes it all.