How that the heightened activity amid ongoing market downturn will be a concern while not all transactions doesn’t revolved on trading. Bitcoin is being use for different services such as mixing, payment, remittance, gambling and many more which is not affected when the price is dumping. I think it will be more concerning if the transaction activity will be lower because it means that the adaption is slowing down due to fear in the market.
Just as you mentioned, other services which do not record the $ value of Bitcoin such as gambling payment for tickets are all areas that contribute more to the Bitcoin ecosystem than traders on the long term basis.