Fees rising isn't the same as 'breaking'. Also this was clearly intentional marketing to promote their chain.
Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why it's obvious it was intentional.
Most of the spike in gas prices here was caused by their contract being horrendously un-optimized. If they had done even basic optimization of their contract, gas prices would've been a tiny fraction of what they were, and they would be orders of magnitude smaller if they used ERC-721A. Here's an estimate of what would have happened if they just optimized their damn contract: https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010
919.96 ETH would have been saved if they optimized it and stayed on ERC-721, and 39194.05 ETH would have been safed if they also switched ot ERC-721A.
I'm convinced that Yuga is just technically incompetent. All of the people I pay attention to in the crypto space are incensed by everything Yuga is doing here, from the un-optimized contracts to blaming ETH for their own incompetence to their pricing model that excludes everyone except for whales who are already wealthy. The people I follow in the space are small-time independent artists who use NFTs as a way to make a living off their original art, and none of them are happy with Yuga at all.
With a more optimized contract, the same number of transactions would have been submitted, and the aggregate computational load would have been smaller, leading to less congestion.
It's all limited by fees. Typically, users would see the high fees and choose not to interact with the contract. It seems during this sale, FOMO outstripped the incredibly (negligently) high expense.
Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why it's obvious it was intentional.