Interestingly, according to
this dashboard and also
this one, Ordinals and Runes which had a small mini-wave in the last weeks, now are again taking less space. There's thus another reason behind the data transaction increase.
Are we about to see a new spam wave, perhaps these "non standard tokens" which deliberately violate the standardness rules of Bitcoin? See
this post for more info ...
I'm still surprised by how much money they're willing to spend on this. It must have been a couple of Bitcoins in transaction fees in just a few hours. If they would have spammed a bit slower, they would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which can only mean they don't care because they earn so much more than that from their spam. Which must mean their gullible victims pay for this.