Sorry but youre both misunderstanding a fundamental point here...

Fees and tx size are two different things. You can have high fees on small transactions and vice versa.

High fees does not necessarily mean more or less people are using the network. Onchain fees are an auction. High fees simply means the price per vbyte has been bid up.

When fees are high, this means fees have been bid up by higher time preference users. There are now more people willing to pay higher price for faster confirmations than before. This does not necessarily mean more or less users. Correlation not causation.

One large transaction can fill the entire block with a huge fee. Or many small transactions with large fees can fill the block. In either case fees are high, but that has no actual bearing on how many people (# of transactions) are using the network at a given time.