High Number of Unconfirmed transactions caused by Mining Pools?

Let me start by admitting that I do not understand the full technical aspects of bitcoin but generally know how it works (so don't flame me as i'm not a crypto scientist). Recently when we have had high numbers of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, i've been noticing a trend of certain mining pools not filling up blocks and therefore adding to unconfirmed transaction numbers on the network.

The pools that I regularly see do this are AntPool and HaoBTC

If they are doing this maliciously to push unconfirmed tx's up (and therefore the bitcoin tx mining fees) then this feels corrupt and we need a solution of some sort to stop this. Yes i'm sure there are some other unsavory characters out there filling the mempool with junk too but that should largely be mitigated by nodes not retransmitting dust transactions and tx's with a low or no fee.

https://blockchain.info/blocks

Example blocks today:

453326 453308

yesterday:

453105 453125 453132

Am I the only one seeing this?