I got this issue weeks ago, and I had to upgrade my Electrum wallet, before I was able to use Increase fee feature. I'have never gotten this issue in the past, and Electrum developer team maybe only deployed this mandatory update to use Increase fee feature with very newest versions of the wallet.
A little bit of history; "
increase fee (rbf)" option has been available even since version 2.7.0 on October 2016 if the user has enabled "
Use replace-by-fee" option in the settings before creating the transaction.
In version 3.1.0 on March 2018, the setting is ticked by default so the increase fee option should be available unless the user disabled that setting.
Then in 4.4.0 in
#e1dc7d1, the setting is removed entirely and enabled opt-in RBF flag to transactions created by Electrum.
FYI, opt-in RBF flag is in each transaction data, not the client.
So if your transaction didn't have an opt-in RBF flag in the first place, using any Electrum version wont enable opt-in RBF Electrum features on it.