How to understand network congestion and it’s relationship with transaction fees

Hi all,

Didn't think I was a crypto noob but I am certainly feeling like it a bit right now. I was attempting to send some BAT from my metamask to blockfi to begin lending it for some passive gains on one of my favorite tokens, however metamask wants to charge me like $40 to send the transaction with "low" priority.

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Obviously the network is hella congested right now with price nearing ATH again, but I wanted to understand just how congested it was and how that was affecting my transaction fees in metamask. I looked at https://www.ethstats.net/ and also https://ethstats.io/, which have similar statistics, but I am having trouble understanding what they all mean in terms of how congested the network is, relatively speaking, and how this translates to tx fees.

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Thanks in advance!