"crash" the network like we had with the spam wars during the Bitcoin (BTC) vs BitcoinXT period. It was said that SegWit would make sustained
attacks like this very expensive and not viable for long periods and I think this event validated those claims. OP, thank you for posting this, because
it would just have gone unnoticed and it is actually very important to show that SegWit is doing what it was supposed to do.
This isn't really relevant to SegWit (which was never about scaling anyway), even without SegWit 1 sat/byte transactions won't make fees rise. Worst thing that can happen is that transactions from other users who used the same fee will get disrupted, but thanks to RBF they can bump the fee a bit to fix it. If you want some silver lining, you can just say that the fee market works as intended and makes spam either useless or very expensive.