That is the easiest way to think about it. Lower fees mean there is less competition for block space, so you don't have to pay so much to get a miner to include your transaction in a block.

Actually I've seen full blocks and 2 sats per vbyte.

So it isn't JUST many transactions in the backlog, but also many URGENT transactions.

What do I mean by that? Transactions that send money from yourself to yourself, and maybe even lightning channel opens are not so urgent, so you keep the fee low. You don't care to compete because you expect that it will eventually get mined and you have no time limits.

So it will be transactions at stores, transactions made as a demonstration that need to settle quickly and exchange withdrawals and deposits. Those are the transactions that are competing... Now who are they competing with?

In the past there have been a series of exchange transactions where a particular exchange is consolidating utxos and migrating to new addresses (eg. Legacy to segwit). They not only filled a bunch of blocks at a time, but they set ridiculously high fees. It honestly feels like a waste of money and disruptive to others.

Like deciding to piss across all urinals in a public bathroom so no one else can piss until you are done.

Also there were degens trying to put NFTs on the blockchain. They too didn't care about high fees because they thought these NFTs would make them rich for being first.

In the future, there will be people who wish to piss away their money. That is who we are really competing with for high fees.

I suppose one last one will be new users trying to get their first bitcoin. They certainly won't have low time preference, they won't yet understand the certainties that bitcoin provides, and in some cases they just need to get bitcoin into their control before they can move on.

Once you are a bitcoiner, you start to understand low time preference. You look to have your transaction confirm in hours, days or weeks to save sats. That will still raise the fees naturally over time, but so far it hasn't been the factor that pumped fees.