Exactly what am thinking. Perhaps the core developers have decided that BTC should not be used for payments, but as digital gold and as a store of value. Only the rich BTC holders can easily make payment these days. Little amount of Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain is hardly made. The might still be the block size limit and something should be done about it. Am having a though that the price will remain high like this for some time at least till the ordinal hype of a thing is over and if they are reduce now we might be waiting hours for confirmations.
Even when we didn't have Ordinals, fees were quite high for payments purposes.
As for Bitcoin Core, I wouldn't say that they don't want bitcoin to be for payments — it's just the fact that they think the base layer needs to be decentralized enough and easy enough for node-running. Their preferred solution is to have payments infrastructure on a different layer, though unfortunately none has been successful as of yet.