This may be a new attack tactic. By flooding the TX pool with large transactions they are trying to artificially jack up TX costs since the spam attack did not work.
As usual Monero will learn from this and improve. 👍 It is best to go through all this while Monero is still not a top world currency.
I think now is about the only time that is possible, especially after the next block having. I doubt it will ever happen again.