Looking through various sources I have a short list of causes for high tx count:

Unlikely:

1. BTC ATH sellers off ramping to a much better cryptocurrency that preserves privacy

2. XMR trending as a massive gainer (after a drop) attracts traders

More Likely:

3. Chain analysis firm floods the tx pool so that their heuristic analysis can pinpoint some XMR transactions

4. Binance has released the secret store of XMR they had stacked up before delisting for unknown reasons

5. A Monero Whale is churning a large amount of XMR

5.b) 'Incognito Market' [darknet market] is reportedly exit scamming - escrows estimated in the millions of USD of XMR

Nobody has put forward a clear case yet, and most Monero folks are nonplussed. However, XMR's dynamic block size is making much better work of the flood than other cryptos and tx fees remain fairly level throughout so at least it's a good stress test.

I want to be a part of it too so I'm gonna throw a few more transactions into the pool right now :)

Maybe BTC users are starting to get it? We should see some analysis from the experts soon...All time highs for sure.

https://tx.town/v/xmr-btc

There's this post from Dec 2022 which may be related https://twitter.com/DontTraceMeBruh/status/1603504938771877888

Looks like anonymity risks induced by the spam got mitigated; and fees calculation was also fixed in the wallet in the last release (v0.18.3.2).