It sounds like there's been a surge in activity on the network due to the minting of EPIC tokens.
There are no tokens being minted because that is impossible in Bitcoin. The protocol just doesn't have that option. They are scamming people by calling their junk "token".
I'm curious to learn more about the impact of this congestion on users and the network's overall performance. How are users navigating through these congestion issues,
It depends on the severity of the attack.
Basically the longer the attack lasts and the higher the fees go, the harder it is going to be for users to "use bitcoin". That means at some point people stop using bitcoin and we could end up with only "investors" who are waiting and hoping for the price to go up while the adoption would have had stopped so it won't go up!
and are there any measures being taken to alleviate the strain on the network?
Nothing serious...