Why Are Transaction Fees Getting More Expensive Over Time?

The MMPLE is where the transactions are waiting before they are confirmed. If you want to be confirmed faster, you need to put a high fee. A malicious miner was spamming the Bitcoin network with high fee transactions because they wanted to artificially inflate the fees of all transactions. And also because they were kind of shilling this narrative of we need to increase the block size in an attempt to basically take over Bitcoin.