inscriptions made it happens faster, but the world's largest and most redundant computing network was always destined to be expensive to use. You get what you pay for.
Discussion
What change was necessary to make inscriptions possible?
Inscriptions were possible in the original release of Bitcoin in 2019. In fact Satoshi inscribed arbitrary data into the block chain in the genesis block, if you recall.
Segwit then enhanced this by creating the witness data section, increasing the size of arbitrary data. Then taproot further enhanced people's ability to inscribe shit into the transactions by removing the limit on the witness section completely.
3...2....1.... here we go