I totally agree. Except high is relative to the number of payments a single on chain transaction represents. $1000 tx fee is totally fine if it represents 10,000 decentralized censorship transactions on an L2.

I do think the old days of individuals using on chain bitcoin for P2P transactions will never scale to incentivize mining while remaining censorship resistant and decentralized. But this has been recognized by the smart kids since like day 2 of bitcoin. Hal instantly saw this and suggested something like banks to solve the scaling problem, but I think lightning and other L2s will make on chain transactions worth the cost because they compress many payments into a single bitcoin transaction.