Whenever situations like this high fee environment happens, one should ask, "cui bono"? Who benefits?

Blackrock benefits. That's who.

I am skeptical that there is some sudden surge in the bullshit NFT market, but rather, I speculate that this is a deliberate attack to drive up fees across the network and shake plebs confidence in Bitcoin itself. Blackrock is a major investor in 4 of the 5 top mining companies. So increased fees directly benefit Blackrock's mining company portfolio. This means that they can at the very least partially regain their spent sats after stuffing inscriptions. With mining companies earning a windfall, the multiples of their value in Blackrock's portfolio likely offsets the initial expense of these ordinals.

And here is the bonus: plebs look at the alarming fees and dump their Bitcoin which Blackrock would then scoop up at a discount to front run their own ETF. High UTXO fees are immaterial to institutions moving multiples of whole bitcoin, but they matter greatly to the average Joe and retail. This current high fee environment does not affect the larger aspect of Bitcoin becoming the global base money, which is the end game. We should not lose sight of this and continue to HODL. Carry on and stack sats.