That's because on the previous bullrun there are organization or group of people who keep spamming the network with dust transactions. The very last is due to Ordinals.
We could experience a lower fees bull run as long as there's no thousands of spam transaction that lead to network congestion. So for your question, it's not permanent, we will soon again experience it, if it happens again.
Yeah I was around then. I think it was rumor that BSV was doing it. I remember paying like 500sats/btye for a transaction.
I almost lost my mind in December 2023 when I payed $28 for a $105 transaction, because of it's urgency, although I later got to understand it was because my coins were not consolidated, but it was huge and the miners were having fun selecting only transactions with very high fees
And sometimes if your UTXO was small then there was no point in sending it anyways. Eventually they returned to normal.
You can always use LN for smaller UTXO if such situations occur, it's fast and cheap. I think smaller UTXOs should use the LN to further decongest the mempool in such situations of fees hike.