This may be a new attack tactic. By flooding the TX pool with large transactions they are trying to artificially jack up TX costs since the spam attack did not work.
As usual Monero will learn from this and improve. 👍 It is best to go through all this while Monero is still not a top world currency.
Is that the actual fee needed to get a 2in/2out tx into the next block or is this literally just the median of fees paid, distorted by the huge consolidation transactions?
Just the median of fees paid. Actual is about 0.001145 ( 0.14 USD)