It's because of the Inscriptions/ordinals thing. People doing that are paying whatever it takes to get those transactions processed.
Maybe you want to accumulate a bit more before moving your BTC to cold storage (or whatever).
Discussion
That’s what I will do next time.
That's what I'm doing these days. It's annoying, but I can't control what people are doing with the network.
I think I need to educate myself more on the bitcoin network mechanics
This is how the mempool looks for the last year. It's being hammered lately.
