The difficulty bomb for the Merge has already gone off and the devs haven't decided to delay it yet, so at least in the near future difficulty should go up. With the way their recent shadow forks have gone (basically no critical issues), I would expect the Merge to happen around July-September.

You can see from here that the difficulty is going up at a good rate despite profitability falling to pre-2021 levels. There's also a good number of idiots - both delusional miners and newbies who haven't done any research on the Merge or current profitability - who keep buying GPUs without any hope of breaking even.

Basically we are at the cusp of GPU mining being dead and warehouses full of GPUs being flooded to the market.