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.
No, I'd never see a huge difference in fees before and after the hard fork as for me, the fees still aren't worthy for that. We're hoping that the hard fork will be the solution to this problem but too sad it fails and we become hopeless. Maybe we can see it was not a problem for those who transfer huge amounts of ERC-20 tokens but for those who are in bounty campaigns and wanted to sell the reward that is clearly a burden to them. That is why I understand their situation and I believe we have that kind of feelings.