Likely the cause is partially from Ordinals.
As far as I can see there are about 20,000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment but about 12,000 are on a 1sat/vbyte fee, about 5,000 on a 2sat/vbyte fee and the rest on a higher fee. According to what I have read, this could be due to what you say about the ordinals or consolidations, otherwise the average fee would be higher.