It is definitely the hype and the rumor mills running that there might be another fork and users might be thinking easy money as they have seen in the past with the other forks. But the fact is that they are making a big change in the protocol level which can create major technical issues which is much risky in many levels and i would definitely stay away from ETH for the time being 
.
.Most of people who were buying ETH last few months to catch pro-fork pump are people who will not be affected by technical risks because most of them will start to dump 3-10 days before fork. Because that's when pre-events bubbles have their top most of the time. People who will be affected by those risks are people who are just about to know about it from mass media which are spamming about merge more and more the closer we are to it. Just few days ago many sites created countdown:
https://www.binance.com/en/ethereum-merge
People like OP (thinking that this big traffic is because of possible flippening, not because of pre-fork merge). People like him:
The latest rumour going around about the Ethereum merge is a dump after, you are wrong if you are one of them, Ethereum going proof of stake and fixing the high gas fee have automatically turn this project into a GOLD, every whales will want to stake and enjoy the rewards, even if a dump happens after the so called fork it won't last.
Those will for sure lose during this event in short/medium and maybe even long time frame.