You have obviously not used SegWit lately, because $35 fees happened last year in December 2017. The fees have dropped to a few cents and some exchanges have started to batch transactions, so the Mempool is basically empty.
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-levelAlso remember that SegWit made spam attacks more expensive and with a empty MemPool, spam attacks will be even more expensive. ^lol^
segwit is not the cause of the mempool/fee reduction.. just look at blocks, segwit is not even 10% of a block utility..
the reason the mempool is near empty is because the only reason it filled was spam
the only reason there was spam was at times that people wanted to push CORE features.
check the history dates of major spam events.
most spam is caused by mixers which guys like gmaxwell are known to be involved in. and as soon as core gets their feature update they turn off their spambots...and try to make it look like its the new core feature that solved a problem.. yet even though their feature is activated, its not USED to any degree to explain the reality of mempool decreases..
just check out the block stats, compare it to the hype of core wanting new features/updates being accepted by the community, not the reddit propaganda
and anyone that wants to scream out the reddit propaganda of "gigabyte blocks" or "no to 2mb/4mb" purely to defend core devs commercial choices, well here is something to enlighten you, using the 'bridge' analogy from the post earlier.
some say that bitcoins bridge can only handle 2000 cars and thus car sharing/lightning aeroplanes (off bridge) are the only way, because bitcoin can only handle 1 lane of traffic, not 2(mb) lanes. not 4(mb) lanes..
yet the commercial decision of devs is that they know bitcoin can handle 4mb of data.. but they just dont want legacy users having that. instead you have to use the single toll road for old cars and only the new segwit cars get to use the other lanes(weight) yet only 10% of cars have updated to the new segwit cars,
also core known devs stopped driving their fleet of mixer old generation cars from going in circles, to stop the traffic jam to make it look like cores new lanes has solved the problem