-A price drop means that in the short term, fewer people are going to be sending to merchants because they get a lower rate.
a price drop actually means much more transactions from people already having bitcoin and sending them to exchanges to sell and wait for the drop to end in order to buy back.
those who are using bitcoin to buy stuff ("send to merchants") will continue doing so no matter what the price is.
-Arguably that there were spam attacks which have subsided.
there is no argument, the spam attacks simply stopped!
you can see it slow down mid June and end by July and then not exist anymore till this day. the August was mostly because of Bitcoin cash Difficulty drama that took most of hashrate over there.