Right now we are at 354 MB / 300 MB,
I wonder where you got the 354 MB from. That's wrong. Currently, there are around 150 MB of transactions waiting for confirmation in the mempool and even a transaction paying only 1 sat/vbyte should be able to enter the mempool of any node.
I checked mempool.observer and I saw 10294 unconfirmed Transactions (138.35 MB) which should be correct.