https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-02/bitcoin-s-plunge-in-volume-stirs-questions-about-its-popularity
No, there's abundant evidence that Coinbase and other "heavy hitter" exchanges implemented transaction batching. The decrease in mempool and fees occurred in a very short period of time, just a few days.
Don't pay too much attention to the mainstream media on the subject of Bitcoin.
I believe it was also mostly Coinbase cluttering the entire mempool with their garbage, which is worrying. If a single entity can fill the mempool due inconpetence, we may have a problem.
The people that bring Ver's spam antics also have a point, it was a mixture of various things but mostly the lack of transaction batching.
Im sure segwit is helping too, 30% is quite a lot, but if anything it proves that it was mostly exchanges and spam rather than massive demand for block space (which ruins BCash's selling pitch as they claimed how it was all due demand.. but we already knew that there is no demand for bigger blocks already since they can't even fill 1MB blocks).