The fee was never the point, everyone assumes the story is cost. It isn't. The story is what disappears once cost stops mattering.
For years
@trondao identity was the small transfer - money sent home, sub - $1,000 payments that made up most of its volume. That is a real infrastructure with a use case that creates potential beyond remittances.
What changed is not the price of a transaction. It is who has to think about one. GasFree lets a user move USDT without ever holding native token, sponsoring the network fee and taking $1.50 out of the transfer itself. On an average transfer of $16,300, that is 0.009%. Nobody has to learn what energy or bandwidth means.
They just send.
Remove that step and the customer changes. Nobody sends $16,000 to a relative. Those are payrolls, supplier invoices, treasury moves - flows that were always waiting for a rail where the fee was boring rather than cheap.
The lesson travels past crypto. Infrastructure wins by becoming invisible, and the last thing to go invisible is almost always the price tag.