or perhaps the ordinals / inscriptions teams have lost their appetite or been persuaded for other reasons to scale back.
Although the last peak was the biggest spam attack in the past year, but it is normal to see the "hype" come down after a while. That's the nature of scam markets where they sell useless junk to newbies. At some point people run out of money to buy the garbage so the pumps start becoming smaller hence the profit or hope for making a profit. The less newbies participate in that scam market, the less junk spam on-chain.
You can see these ups and downs in the 1-year chart:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1y,weightYou can see how it is hyped up, then dies again. Then hyped up again and dies again.
I don't see this last death to be the end either.
You cannot censor someone else's Bitcoin transactions from getting confirmed by miners no matter what filters you set on your own node.
Refusing to relay non-standard, abusing, exploitive, spam, etc. type transactions is never called "censoring" and full nodes have always been rejecting such transactions from very early days.
I want to agree with you on this, remember when ICOs were at it's highest hype cycle and people were shifting tokens in and out of Bitcoin to profit from that... well, that was also when we experienced the most congestion on the mempool.
Then large social media companies started to ban all Crypto advertisements on their platforms and the ICOs died out... and with them the congestion on the mempool.
It takes time for people to realize when they are scammed... then everything comes down like a house of cards.