No, the 40% you see is the difficulty adjustment of the last period. The difficulty to find blocks gets adjusted depending on the hashrate every few weeks to make sure the global average of blocks coming in stays at 10 minutes.

The v/sat per byte is the fee. At the moment it’s higher because people are storing ordinals / NFTs in the chain. Lots of discussions to be found on this topic because it’s polluting the mempool and raising fees. However you can still send low fee transactions, they just take longer now: can be up to days..