When consolidating your inputs, make sure you use a fee that gets confirmed. As you said, mining fees are increasing, usually a very low fee can keep your transaction unconfirmed for a long long period, so be aware of what exactly you want to do.
When consolidating many small inputs you should not mind waiting, because you'll also want to save fees in that transaction, consolidation includes many inputs and as such a larger tx size. 1 sat/vbyte is the best fee rate for consolidating many inputs, and you then have to be patient and just wait for the tx to be confirmed.Due to Ordinals spam, tx's cannot get confirmed with 1 sat/vbye anymore and the fee rate for purging is <6.42 as i type this, so right now may not be a good time for someone to consolidate their many inputs, except they are in a hurry, but if they are not; they can wait until tx fee rate is down to around 1-2 sats/vbye.
Well the problem is that we are not going to see 1-2 sat/vbyte anytime. Right now you can see that in order to get your transaction confirmed, you need to have 14+ sat/vbyte and this may increase as we move closer to the Bitcoin halving.
So, if any want to spend from his wallet, he would have to pay this high fee, So it is better to consolidate the inputs during the weekends as i noticed that in the last weekend the transaction fee fell as low as 7 sat/vbyte.