You've already got a pretty good explanation, you can read more detailed (and possibly too technical)
here.
I will address the statistics and your conclusion:
Here are statistics for the last few blocks:
[~snip~]
The average total should be well under 10 minutes.
Indeed, right now, on average, the blocks are mined a little bit faster than the desired 10 minutes.
And in such case (or when in doubt) you can look at websites like
https://mempool.space/You will see that we are near the end of the 2016 blocks (92.21 %, ~1 day remaining) and then the difficulty will be adjusted with ~4.75%, making the next 2016 blocks harder to mine.
This happens because in the last 2 weeks the hash rate has been increasing and the difficulty will now also increase to remain "in sync".
It can happen (like when mining was banned from China and miners got unplugged/moved away) that hash rate falls, then the difficulty is reduced.