charging passive holders to pay fund projects who invest in your ecosystem like Lido, Aave and the DATs (who collectively fund Eth client teams, several EF spinouts, the general Defi buildout etc.) is, actually, very good. the problem was never too much inflation, but too little investment. reducing the former will necessarily have a chilling effect on the latter. the ethereum researcher community has sadly never been good at predicting these second or third order effects.
A fact I feel like almost nobody knows: Ethereum's gas limit will be increased to ~200M after Glamsterdam, a huge increase from the 60M we have today.
That’s a 3x+ of L1 execution capacity, with expectation of further doubling soons after that. Assuming no similar increase in demand, fees could stay near zero for years.
This is the result of several innovations coming together at the right time: ePBS gives payloads more time, BALs let clients prefetch/parallelize execution work, and gas repricings make higher limits safe.