yes it has become the law of economics, who pays higher will be prioritized. for now the ethereum network is not friendly for traders or airdrop hunters with small capital. Apart from the factors that you said the density of transactions on the ETH network is also due to the increase in users who swap or britge in hopes of meeting the requirements for an airdrop.
The ETH network has multiple purposes of daily transactions for exchanges, bridges, NFTs and more, so the most dense altcoin blockchain network for the number of requests and offers continues to increase every day, although there are already several other alternative blockchain networks but the amount of transaction density on ETH is also not decrease.