Mempool congestion is super high now. I have never seen such congestion before. Even with a 600+ vMB is not enough to get the next block LOL
Cause?
My wild guess is Bitcoin Ordinals.
Yes.
But the mempool is slightly lower than 600 sat/vbyte for now
With block #840.000 there was also another novelty to add to the Ordinals case - Runes[1].
The average block time is ~9.8 minutes, which means that we may need a longer time to return to normal fees.
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment but I wouldn't say that the average block time directly impacts the fees that are being broadcasted. Perhaps you were saying that there should be more discussing in increasing the mining time? I don't see how that would impact the fees in any meaningful way.
[1]
https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/