We all know that blockchains don't scale and that fees will be prohibitively high someday but we are simply not yet at that point. This mempool congestion is happening because someone is investing a lot of money to make a point, possibly for a blocksize increase or possibly just to encourage general FUD.
I have been watching the mempool since mid-2017 and this latest surge of activity driving fees up over 600 sats/byte without any corresponding FOMO price action is clearly an attack. No other cause is believable to me. I'm not saying that all the inscription/ordinal stuff is spam, but a vulnerability is clearly being exploited alongside well-intentioned transactions. This is to be expected, and so is the response--we must do something to stop the attack. The answer is above my pay grade but I am glad to hear that nostr:npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk is working on it.
Discussion
I tend to agree with Luke that the block size limits were raised too high too fast, and for 99% of the past six years we would not have even noticed the limitations of smaller blocks. Decentralization is the key to bitcoin's success and that means regular people need to run nodes on affordable hardware. Although you can do it on cheap hardware today the reality is already that in order to run a reliable node for long periods of time you need something better. Bitcoin's future depends on the node operators and the barriers to entry must be lowered.