I think what's happening is one or two very large miners, like 20% or so of the mining hash power, are making pointless transactions that resemble coin joins, consolidations and batch payments knowing that they will get back 20% of the fees they spend, and if they put enough of these large transactions into the mempool at the front of the price range, the miners will recoup most of this by the rise in fees by the rest of the users with their real transactions.

Go look at some random recent blocks. They aren't ordinals. They are bulk transactions with 50+ on either or both in and out. The total block sizes are not bloated like ordinals do from witness data.

All they have to do is achieve raising the average block fee total for blocks to 5 times normal and they get their fees back.

I think we are looking at an attempt by a bitcoin miner (miners) to bail itself (themselves) out of a debt problem by gaming the fee market.