yes, use less relays... use the most popular relays and help the network by subscribing to paid relays, nostr.wine and nostr.land are the two best out of them, i keep a subscription and they use those resources people are giving to them to maintain a better coverage of events and reducing the amount of traffic you need

there's big problems in the protocol currently that obstruct the use of relays as proxies while at the same time allowing paid relay usage, and a lot of people in the dev community who are living from grants and don't have a strong feeling of imperative to make this protocol self-funding, and so they are wandering off doing dumbshit that has nothing to do with actually making us free