Historically, paying 100sat/vB almost always got you next block confirmation but today's high fees are not exceptional historically.

This graph shows data for 100sat/vB or more. Today's fees barely show.

The 2017/2018 fee event considering 1sat/vB and above:

The end-of-2023 fee event:

These charts are rendered by a server that measures the mempool's size and as there is no such thing as "the mempool", it's only one server's perspective on things and that server occasionally loses data which I think are these vertical drops in mem pool size.