Right now the average tx fee is around BTC0.0002, and I don't think that people would be really happy if they are forced to pay 100x of that (imagine paying BTC0.02 in tx fee).
There was a time years ago when 0.01 was the norm.
It's all relative. The key is that the block reward incentive mechanism needs to be robust without external guarantees like mass adoption and a million dollar bitcoin. We can't rely on those assumptions. More to the point, many people don't view Bitcoin primarily as a payment mechanism, but rather digital gold. In that context, fees are much less important.
It was never a given that mining should earn this much.
That's not the point. We need to account for rationality. A miner isn't going to lose money mining a chain simply because it was profitable in the past. He will shut down.
I won't be worth anything if it's not used for payment settlement.
It can not be just digital gold. It derives the value from being a payment settlement, so if people just only hold on to their coins, there is no value at all.
That's also why we can't keep the 1MB blocksize.
No one said it won't be used for settlement. But the value provided by the finite supply combined with the network's security should be considered in relation to transaction fees. Even at $1 or $20 fees, that value could be entirely worth it. Personally, I don't think Bitcoin is very useful for commerce (it could be with Layer 2 applications). It's useful for P2P value storage and transfer. Leaving the context of $3 cups of coffee and entering the context of people storing their net worth in Bitcoin is where this is relevant.
Bitcoin is arguably the best and only viable payment solution for online transactions.
Credit/debit cards aren't safe to use on the internet, as fraud is common, and leaving all your credit card info online to pay online is just too risky. Credit/debit cards just weren't designed with the internet in mind.
Cash obviously won't work on the internet at all.
There's paypal and such, but then there's the problem with how do you pay paypal?
But even if bitcoin would only be used as an internet currency, that's still a huge market. And bitcoin is already becoming a big player in remittance.